Originally posted on 10/15/10 on Mrrrdev.

Minecraft changed my life.  More on that later.

I began my adventure into programming when I was four and my mom bought an Apple IIc for us.  Mixed in with Reader Rabbit and Space Quarks, I found a disk that had a program called Logo on it.  Logo is a programming language in which a “turtle” cursor resides on the screen and you as the programmer gave it commands on how to move about the screen, creating a trail marking the “turtle’s” traveled path.  With a few simple instructions, you could create basic shapes like squares, triangles, and circles, all while the “turtle” hustles about the screen, following your every commands.  It was an interesting program as a four-year-old, though I wasn’t sure if it was a game or not at the time.

I started playing video games as many a young child did, originally on Apple IIc, then the Colecovision system, then working my way up to the staple console systems, such as the NES, SNES, and Gameboy.  While I enjoyed the games I played, I always had hypothetical thoughts about how it would be neat if this happened instead or if you could do this.  I wrote down a few general game ideas, though they just sat in a journal since there was nothing I could do about it.  The closest I ever got to debugging a game was blowing in a cartridge to get it to play correctly.

Fast forward to sixth grade, where I learned how to type using PAWS, a typing tutor involving trying to type faster than the cat walks past your words, as part of a class that rotates subjects quarterly.  I got through the typing assignments a few weeks before the end of the quarter, and then my teacher handed me my first time-filler assignment.  I started reading over what it entailed when I saw that I would be doing some programming in… Logo.  My mind flashed back to my four-year-old self, and I re-familiarized myself with the program.  Soon, I had completed all of the time-filler assignments the teacher had prepared, which forced him to go back to his source and copy some additional assignments.  By the end of the quarter, my teacher encouraged me to write Logo programs to draw more advanced challenges such as filled martini glasses holding an olive skewered with a toothpick.

It was a good quarter.

Post image By Susam Pal – Own work, Public Domain,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79698503