One of the most important skills to learn today is how the computers and electronics that surround us in our day-to-day lives work, and one of the best ways to do that, rather surprisingly, is one of the world’s most popular games.

Learning to code using Minecraft at one of our summer camps is not only fun and insightful if you want to work with computers or robotics in the future, but the capabilities of the game for creating some amazing and elaborate designs continue to surprise.

Possibly one of the most famous builds of all time is Minecraft in Minecraft, made without the use of mods, datapacks or command blocks, which would make it easier to do a significant amount of the coding work outside of Minecraft.

Using only redstone and the blocks available in the vanilla version of the game, Sammyuri, Uwerta and StackDoubleFlow managed to make a functional, recognisable and three-dimensional version of the game whilst in the game.

It looks like it is running on an original Game Boy, the screen resolution is 96x64 ‘pixels’ (really blocks cleverly moving and shifting colours, and the framerate can be measured in weeks without speedhacks, but the fact it was achieved at all is utterly miraculous.

However, whilst a cool hack by itself, what makes it so awesome is what it proves about Minecraft itself as a programming tool.

Minecraft is Turing complete, named after the late Alan Turing, which is capable of theoretically running any computer programming instruction.

It works through redstone, which works like electrical wiring, but when combined with torches, comparators and repeaters, can allow for the creation of logic gates and transistors.

In practice, this means that you can simulate a CPU and other computer parts using redstone, and once you do that, you can create a functional computer.

These computers are both extremely big and extremely slow, but the fact that they can be used to run games as sophisticated as Minecraft within them is astonishing.