Not a site, but it may be worth a mention anyway. Minecraft has done an incredible job getting the younger generation into coding. Creating your own server starts off fairly straightforward, but gets very technical very quickly if you allow it to. From dealing with and editing all the files needed, setting up databases needed by some plugins, setting up websites, communities and shops for your server, all the way to eventually writing your own plugins. On top of that, Redstone and Command Blocks in the vanilla game, as well as mods like ComputerCraft in the Forge world have done a lot to get people excited about tech.
I wonder if this will result in a demographic shift. I would hypothesize, though I have no immediate data to back it up, that the set of those who play Minecraft isn't the same as the set of those who use social media. While plenty would be in both, I doubt the overall demographics are the same.
I also suspect the level of technicality scaling and the type of scaling is different as well, with minecraft server hosting having a higher barrier of entry and scaling more complex faster than customizing a social media site with html/css.
Thus my guess is that while Minecraft will lead to an increase in people building deeper technical skills more focused on server administration, there will be a larger loss of those who are buildings more artistic skills with just enough technical ability to design their artistic vision in html/css.
> the set of those who play Minecraft isn't the same as the set of those who use social media
?
Minecraft is one of the biggest games in the world. To an approximation, everyone uses some kind of social media (whether it's facebook, instagram, snapchat, tiktok, twitter, reddit, etc). There would be an extremely large, close to 100%, overlap of "people that play minecraft" and "people who consume social media".
Playing Minecraft itself has an incredibly wide level of technical scaling, from 'just' building pretty buildings in creative, through to all the pretty advanced redstone circuitry. I'm sure you've seen all the giant functioning CPU builds made from "off the shelf" minecraft blocks?
Going further into the "developing" against Minecraft, people get into coding/hacking at Java mods, or creating texture packs (which can get deep into things like JSON definitions for biome lighting/fog configurations), server administration, or 3D modelling for creating custom mob in Blockbench www.blockbench.net
>Minecraft is one of the biggest games in the world.
Yes, but the set who play enough to get into modding, especially to get into hosting a modded server, is much smaller. I think data from a few years ago was that most sales are from systems that don't even allow modding (it was brought up during a discussion where I was wondering how much of Minecraft's continued popularity was due to modding).
>Playing Minecraft itself has an incredibly wide level of technical scaling, from 'just' building pretty buildings in creative, through to all the pretty advanced redstone circuitry. I'm sure you've seen all the giant functioning CPU builds made from "off the shelf" minecraft blocks?
I've taken part in building them back when red stone first came out, but I think the appeal is still distinctly different than that of editing one's social media site and that this difference can have an influence on which demographics are impacted.
I think minecraft is going to be instrumental to a new generation of tinkerers, scripters, and coders, especially as our every day applications seem to become less open to tinkering and modifying (yes, other options exist on the market, but we are talking children who aren't making the purchasing decisions and what the average family has available), but I don't think it is going to completely fill the gap left by what OP was mentioning.
This depends very much on what you define as "social media". It sounds like you see social media as a distinct "thing", with a distinct demographic - it is not. Those who use Facebook don't use TikTok & vice versa. Is Twitch social media? Is Minecraft social media?
Can anyone suggest redstone resources? I tried to learn computer architecture, logic gates etc but found it overwhelming, maybe making a simple cpu in redstone would be more approachable.
The nand2tetris course is a better idea than doing it in redstone. A lot of redstone logic relies on strange bugs in Minecraft, so you'd quickly have to learn and memorize these quirks instead of the fundamentals. You can also try playing nandgame.com.
This is less true than it once was. Most of the bug exploits now actually have built-in components that are used instead (observers being the big one).
I don't think that Minecraft is a good choice for actually learning computer engineering, because the physics of Minecraft are very different than real physics. But with modern redstone, I think it could be a really approachable way to understanding the kind of thinking that goes into building a processor.
