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While there’s always been a clear focus by several companies and websites to provide game development resources for the beginner / hobbyist crowd (hello!), there’s always been the barrier of the age of the actual developer.
At what point can you teach a child about programming?
When I was growing up, there was nothing for kids until you were introduced to something like Logo. Logo’s great for teaching the concept of breaking down tasks to atomic levels (it’s almost like a fuzzy bear form of assembler), but it doesn’t help bridge any gap between Logo and say…C++.
A few years ago, a few ex-Microsofties pulled together the Phrogram project which was a toolkit for actually trying to zero-in on helping kids develop software. Built on the .NET framework, it creates an almost mashup of QBasic, Logo and VB.NET.
Since it landed, it has been building to a tool that perhaps can really help kids out. Check out this video of Tribes (which is freely available from the Phrogram website) made by an actual user.
Another quite recent entry to the field of teaching game development / programming to the younger masses is the Kodu project created by another Microsoftie (hmm is there a theme?). It seems to be an official Microsoft project, and promises a visual / interactive layer of making games on the PC / XBox360 suitable for pickup by younger audiences.
I didn’t want to embed any of the “official” Kodu previews or tech demos, because they were created by adults. I was kind of hoping there’d be some actual “kid produced” stuff on the Kodu website, but I didn’t see anything.
I found this video on YouTube…the sound isn’t too great, but it does demonstrate what can be done with Kodu in a short timespan (the author mentions it only took a few evenings).
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Kodu and Phrogram try to teach programming in very different ways. With Phrogram we try to give the ‘QBasic’ type programming approach that many of us ‘old folk’ learned on. We speficially avoid any visual ‘click to program’ type approaches like Kodu. Kodu is more comparable to something liek Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/
Something else you might like to look at is Small Basic from Microsoft research. It takes a similar simplified approach like Phrogram but doesn’t include the game type libararies that we think is a great selling point for us. If you need any more Phrogram info feel free to drop me an email
Hi Andy, thanks for stopping by.
Yes, I’ve got an older version of Phrogram and that’s (more or less) the impression I came away with myself. For the purposes of full disclosure I was at one point in time in the process of authoring a book on Phrogram with Charles River Media. That project fell through, but I’m starting to wonder if there’s an audience for an ebook form of what I was working on…
But thanks for passing on “Small Basic” ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx ) – that seems like another attempt at trying to form a natural progression arc for a pre-VB audience into VB.
There are a number of great student built examples of Kodu games on the http://www.PlanetKodu.com website worth looking at.
At PlanetKodu, we’re building a supportive resource for the emerging Kodu community with the software’s release, free (for PC), to the public in the last few days.
Regards
Martin Jorgensen
ideasLAB
Planet Kodu
Thanks for stopping by Martin, and thanks for mentioning PlanetKodu. This looks like a good community resource for Kodu enthusiasts!