Journal cptdondo's Journal: Programming for kids 1
I know this has come up before. My 10 year old has been playing some basic flash games, and wants to learn how to "make a game". I have kturtle installed, and I expect that might keep him interested for about a week. Then what?
What good tools are there to allow a normal, curious 10 year old to write something with a fairly quick return on the time invested? I know someone is going to say that I should launch him straight in to perl, or C++, or something. Not happening. Those days are long gone. I need something that can create visual bang quickly and easily, and scale up to allow him to build a simple flight simulator (stick drawing of a plane, a horizon, and keyboard for pitch/yaw/roll).
Ideas (Score:2)
http://www.alice.org/ [alice.org] seems to come up every time it gets asked, but I've never tried it.
If you want to ease him into it, you could start with map making or modding, eg UnrealED or Garry's Mod. Depending on what values you're teaching the kid you could probably track down disk images/emulator for the c64 pinball construction set or racing destruction set or the like, of course all of these depend on whether he likes the genre and whether he'll insist on "making a game for real".