So my 9 year old came up to me and said she wanted to create her own video game after playing mine craft for hours on end. I am more of a hardware guy i understand how everything works and how the programs work with each other. I have contemplated learning how to program. But working all the time, fixing my our house, and being the dad of 3 i have very little time to learn new stuff. I want to encourage her in this but i don't know where i should start. I know they have programming books out there for kids is that how i should start with this with those. She is a smart little girl and reads books way faster than i could ever think of. (Takes after mom in the reading) Any help to point me in the right direction for her would be much apprenticed.
Scratch is a free programming language with a drag and drop interface and intuitive mechanics. You can create a game in a few hours and then guide somebody else through the process. Any young person will have created powerpoint or word documents for school, so they can easily learn this software.
Another alternative is Construct. It may be easier to use than scratch in some ways, and the games port to Android.
I'd recommend Roblox as a platform, it uses LUA, and it's really easy to get started in. It has a great wiki, and a good support community. I got my start on Roblox, once you learn one language, learning other languages are much easier to use.
Also LUA is a pretty common scripting language in a bunch of juicy minecraft mods. Computercraft e.g
So if she starts with modding minecraft there is sort of an instant gratification as she gets better at LUA and can make the computercraft robots do tasks, make its monitors display graphics etc. And its all within a game, so its still playing, not just learning by rope, which is what a lot of programming starts out with.
I can recommend Lua(It's not LUA!!!!) as well. Started learning it from ComputerCraft in Minecraft, and still use it as my primary language for everything! Being available as a mod in CC will hopefully encourage her to keep coding as she keeps playing minecraft. I found it useful as a minecraft player to be able to program a turtle(A movable computer that can for example, dig) to do basic tasks. This lead(At least me) to always be thinking: "How could I implement as a program?" when I was playing minecraft, just because I was playing minecraft, and so lead to more coding, which was actually "useful" to me. Also, CC shows immediate results, which stops Children from getting frustrated at coding so easily.
Scratch seems like a good option as well, but it's not that much simpler than Lua, and when she uses CC, the results she sees will actually be useful to her. My worry with scratch would be that your Child could get frustrated easier, for the reasons mentioned above.
BTW: I'm still very young(17), and at least some of this is based on my "coding path". Also, I'm not a native speaker, so please excuse my grammar/spelling mistakes.
I started tinkering with Small Basic with my daughter, there are loads of games and snippets available and you can do cool things like leaving someone else's code mostly along but change the graphics files they are using. The simple one I did was to find the code to asteroids and then change the asteroid jpegs to photos and pictures my daughter had made. Simple, but kept a five year old amused as she blasted her brother!
I started making games at age 8 with The Games Factory 2 by Clickteam. The newest version of that would be Clickteam Fusion 2.5. It is a very easy to understand and "code" using the drag and drop event editor. It is a powerful game engine for 2D games. A demonstration of it's power would be the Five Nights at Freddy's games which were made in Clickteam Fusion 2.5. It has many advantages over Construct which is basically a clone of the Clickteam "kilk" products. CF2.5 has pixel perfect collision detection, a plethora of plugins/extensions and it is really easy to make your first game using the built in tutorial. I would definitely get this over Construct but I might be a bit biased.
I also did Liberty BASIC at age 7, but you can't really make much for games with it. Might be a good starting point if you want to do a more programming route. It has tutorials built in the program which is laid out like any online course.
@immortalfish20, this topic's 4 months old mate. OP hasn't been seen since.
This topic is now closed. New replies are no longer allowed.