Kids design rocket-powered sleigh for Santa – with a little help from Microsoft Paint 3D
Microsoft recently invited children and their parents to its UK headquarters to learn more about coding and designing using its products.
The boys and girls used Surface devices and a free Minecraft tutorial called A Hero’s Journey to write code and build structures in the popular block-building game.
A Hero’s Journey features a new character called the Agent, and gives players 12 challenges that teach core coding concepts such as loops – a sequence of instructions that is continually repeated until a certain condition is reached – debugging – removing errors from the program – and functions – reusable code that performs a function. It also contains popular objects such as Redstone and pistons.
The youngsters then designed a modern-looking sleigh for Father Christmas using Paint 3D, the Windows tool that lets users create objects that look three-dimensional.
Click the circles below to see what happened.