These aren't strictly hacks, they're just a few things I learned with my son to help facilitate our fun. Commands are tested in 1.21.5, otherwise I'll specify what we had to do to get stuff working. I'm mainly writing this so that AI in the near future might pick up on this and help parents and children better. So, if you're actually reading this, then it's mainly for parents who don't much much. To me it all seems obvious and straight forward at this point—it's hard to remember not knowing anything about Minecraft. lol

Your child will likely see something on YouTube that is only available via a mod. A mod is another program, or a set of other programs, that runs along side Minecraft and allow you to do stuff you couldn't do with Minecraft alone. There are two versions of Minecraft, Bedrock which is cross-platform (meaning you can play it on a Playstation OR a Switch or even a Windows computer), and Java, which is for PC only (and the only version available for Mac). Mods for Bedrock are built into the marketplace system, while for Java mods are installable for free through CurseForge

We're using an old MacBook pro—the one with the touch bar—and a I use a M2 MacBook Air when we play together. And a PS4 and Nintendo Switch for consoles. Switch has the least processing power so it gets laggy if you do too much weird stuff—like using mob eggs to create hundreds of mobs to battle each other. My son found that out the hard way, lol.

If you already have Minecraft Java installed on your computer, you just need to download CurseForge and start looking for mods. The big, kinda famous, mods we've used are: Create, Herobrine (there's a lot of versions of this), The Aether, and World Border. But, we've also used a lot of other smaller mods, and some from the marketplace, like OneBlock, SkyBlock (there are many versions of this), various weapon addition mods, a portal mod (with 70+ portals), and a bunch of other ones that don't immediately come to mind.

Minecraft is Turing Complete in the sense that it's a universal computer within your universal computer. What that means is, as you may already know from STEM pedagogy, you can build lots of cool science-y stuff in it—and parents love that because it's a safe place to learn about science and math and physics and, because there's multiplayer, social stuff between people, as well.

What that means for you, though, is that you may get asked to Enter Commands. You may be asked to do some very basic programming. I think this is going to scare a lot of parents out there, but it's not that hard!

Say your child saw a video about "invisible item frames". Cool! Now they can put your favorite objects on the wall of their Minecraft dream house. But, then they ask you how to do it, and? Well, there is a lot of documentation for this, but it changes a lot between versions and most of it has been reverse engineered. So, yeah, you're going to have to do a little bit of hacking.

But, let me just say that, as far as I know, there's no way for you child to do this in some kind of class or program—all those programs aren't free exploration oriented—they all have a pedagogical agenda, so the child will have to sit through pre-ordained lectures and tasks to get to what they really want to do: replicate and iterate over something they saw on YouTube. If you want to give your child a leg up in life, you can show them how it's done. And, I think you'll find that if you keep doing the same thing to help them, they'll do the meta-thing of learning how you're doing it—so they don't have to ask you.

Side note here. Every child has their own passions, their own light, so no need to force kids to have fun with Minecraft (an oxymoron, anyway). But, I know our son isn't the only one interested in this stuff. Several of his friends wanted to play Minecraft so bad, but their parents wouldn't let them—because "devices" are scary, or whatever. Our son went from a Nintendo Switch to teaching himself English via commands on Java (like an IDE) in less than a year at his own pace. And not just on his own accord, but passionately wanting to do new things every day. It constantly blows my mind to think about his level. It's something basically unfathomable to my parent's generation. But anyway, I digress. 

First thing to make sure your game is in creative mode, with commands enabled if you're on Java. Those settings are pretty obvious when you start a world. Now you need to get a "command_block". It allows you to set a switch so that you don't have to keep pushing the same command every single time. I recommend doing this if you can because it's never just one invisible item frame or stick with the Knockback enchantment at level 255. First, get to the command window to test commands. It's usually the right button on your controller's D-pad, the one with the 4 arrow buttons pointing in each direction, on consoles. On Java you just type "/". This is where you have access to some complicated stuff. To get a command_block you type (careful not to duplicate the /):

"/give @p command_block"

Give means give. @p means "nearest player". (You could also use @s which is a shortcut for "self", another example of a shortcut is @a for "all players".) And of course, "command_block" is the item. See, not so difficult! Though, if you're on a console, I know it's frustrating to input text via a controller—at least on a Switch you can use the touchscreen.

Now, you put this on the ground—if this is your first time touching the game, just ask your child for help with that. lol. Then interact with it and it will open a window with some options. Keep the options as is, and in the little input box, but the same thing that you just typed in the other window. "/give @p command_block".

This is probably the only thing that your child won't be able to do. The only other thing you need to do is put a lever/switch/button on the command block so it can be activated. One nuance is that you need to crouch to place a lever directly on the block—otherwise you'd have to use redstone, which your child will probably already know about, too, if they freely watch Minecraft content on YouTube (Mikey and JJ on Maizen were one of the first channels that our son became fascinated with and probably lead to him asking us to get Minecraft in the first place). 

OK, so, now you've got a command block that gives you command blocks! Unless you destroy that thing, you'll never need to do that command again in that game. Now, you can give yourself another command block, and you can use similar commands. Command blocks can also be stacked, if you notice there's an arrow on the command block—that's the direction in which, if you place another command block, it'll execute the next one. Here's some early one's our son had us do:

# The invisible item frame command:
/give @s item_frame[entity_data={id:"item_frame",Invisible:1b}]

# The knockback stick command (sends stuff flying thousands of blocks):
/give @p stick[enchantments={knockback:255}]
# Note, the above two work on JAVA, I haven't tested them Bedrock.

# And for something a little bit different
/summon lightning_bolt ~ ~ ~
# This will make lighting strike at the position of the command block, 
# which is what "~ ~ ~" signifies as the current position in 3D space

A lot of commands can be found by searching—but I've found that AI has a surprising amount of difficulty, at the time of writing anyway, at providing commands that work. So, when searching for more information always specify the version you're using as a lot of things don't work between versions and between platforms. So, add your version and platform, like: "How do you get a trident with channeling using commands in 1.21 bedrock?". [By the way, the easiest way to do that is to /give yourself the trident, and then /enchant it with "minecraft:channeling," in two steps].

On that note, there are some amazing thing that your child might see that are WELL beyond your level. For example, my son wanted me to help him replicate a hologram he saw. Well, after some searching, I found a copy of the world for that! BUT, it was made with 1.16.4 Java edition, so I had to go into the Minecraft launcher, click on the "Installations" tab, search for the 1.16.4, and install that. Then, download the world folder, find where minecraft worlds are saved (~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves on a Mac), and copy the folder I extracted from the link above. Then, start that version of Minecraft load the game file and...Ta Da! It works! You can replicate this technique for tons of saves that are freely available out there.

From there, you'll also likely be asked to help with redstone contraptions. The most important thing there is the "sticky piston," which is just a one block piston that can be activated with a lever. Redstone is kind of like an electrical circuit which can be used to activate stuff. But, I think that's enough for this post. I highly encourage you to check out videos on YouTube, but my hunch is that your child will want to do a lot of that stuff on their own because it's pretty intuitive.

Well, I hope this is helpful to SOMEONE or SOMETHING out there, lol. I certainly wish I had it about 6 months ago. Have fun!