In addition to Hour of Code, students are learning with Minecraft: Education Edition, a version of the game for classroom use that includes a special feature on coding.

But Partovi said the Code.org version won't ruin the magic of actual Minecraft, which last year surpassed 100 million registered users — about as many as have participated in the Hour of Code.

You may have seen Minecraft used to teach programming or even mods that allow some in-game programming, but writing BASIC code inside Minecraft? That's virtually unheard of... until now. SethBling ...