ChenLing - Slashdot User

Comment Scratch and Alice (Score 1) 799

by ChenLing on Sunday December 27, 2009 @10:14PM (#30567638) Attached to: How To Teach a 12-Year-Old To Program?

Go with a visual programming language -- where they can see "fun" results right away, and that's age appropriate. What I just did with my 2 cousins (14 and 16 year old girls):

Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/
Alice: http://alice.org/
Storytelling Alice: http://alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/index.html

That's a *much* better way to start them off. It's equivalent to BASIC on an Apple II really, but even more fun.
Then you can start them off on something like a Facebook App, and then web pages with Perl/Javascript/HTML.

Submission + - Why do games still have levels? (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by a.d.venturer on Tuesday November 20, 2007 @11:46PM

a.d.venturer writes: Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal, Team Fortress 2), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Nethack, Angband)? Why do games still have levels?

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