Just another Manic Mineday.

Raspberry Pi Mineday is upon us and there’s just time before Liz comes back and kicks me off for messing about to get in a few posts about one of my pet subjects — learning through play. In this case, learning through playing Minecraft. Hurrah!  I can sometimes be found playing the Xbox version in a darkened room, rocking gently and mumbling, “Why dig when you can code? Why … dig … when … you …. can … CODE?” Indeed. The Pi version is where it’s all happening.

Hands up who, the moment they saw this, thought, “Rude words! Let’s write rude words!” Shame on you.

I wasn’t going to post anything from Martin O’Hanlon, he has done far too much fantastic stuff in Raspberry Pi Minecraft — hide and seek; 3D-model creator; a working canon etc etc — and if we are not careful with our praises he will withdraw into that land through a kitchen cupboard, Narnia like, and spend the rest of his days riding about on the second hand of a huge clock. But then a Tweet was twote and Martin couldn’t resist:

I was at Young Rewired State‘s (YRS) festival of code this weekend, mentoring a group of young coders from BBC Birmingham, when I saw a tweet from Raspberry Pi about it being Minecraft day on Monday, so I thought, I’m surrounded by coders, we have a weekend ahead of us, we must be able to create something…

Martin’s Python script turns Tweets into chunky airwords in the Minecraft world. It’s a lovely example of interfacing the Web with the Raspberry Pi and a great example to start the day. And if you’ve never seen Martin’s Raspberry Pi Minecraft stuff before, or you have installed Minecraft on your Pi and are not sure where to start, you simply must visit his site Stuff about code, where he has oodles of Pi-related projects and tutorials as well as the Minecraft goodies. It’s one of our favourite Raspberry Pi sites. Thanks Martin!

More Raspberry Pi Minecraft will be coming up at random intervals. In the meantime, if you haven’t already done so, install it on your Pi! And if you have done anything inspiring, amazing or outrageous on Pi Minecraft please let us know (today only!) on blog@raspberrypi.org.