Hi. I want to get my little cousins into computers, and since they’re kids, making games are really fun for them. I made a game with them with Love2D and they had a blast (I put their faces on the characters) but I think Love2d is a bit too hard for them.
My main motive for them is to make something and be creative. Programming is just a tool for that.
So something simpler with less code and mental load that let’s them create stuff more simply is good.
What do you guys suggest?
Colobot! And Ceebot!
This seems… wierd and cool. Will look into it for sure. Thanks.
FYI IIRC Ceebot is a series and had several different versions, each tailored to a different education level, as it was aimed at teaching programming in schools (Ceebot-A, Ceebot-Teen, Ceebot3, Ceebot4).
Personally, I fell in love with Colobot as a kid (still have the box somewhere, I think), which was the original release, with a protagonist (of a sort) and a story. Ceebot grew out of that, as the devs recognized the engine’s potential in education.
All were released for free at some point (including Colobot).
- Microbit was designed for just this: https://microbit.org/
- There’s a whole ecosystem of addon peripherals to make fun, tactile games: https://microbit.org/buy/accessories/
- It even runs scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/microbit
- Once older, if still interested, they can graduate to Arduinos or Raspberry Pis.
- Especially for smaller kids (< 12 according to Python researchers), coding abstractions may be a bit hard to grasp and they may get discouraged. A little more of a gentle ramp might be physical kits like Snap Circuits: https://elenco.com/snapcircuits/
Thank you these seem great.
I’ve been teaching scratch as an extra curricular for elementary students for a little over a year. I’ve taught 10 year olds basic algorithm stuff with it (boolean, if/then) and basic game dev patterns (event loop, signal/listener) with some success. I have had no success with 6 year olds (granted my attention was divided) but the nice thing is that they were content to use it as paint and drag sprites around.
Don’t know if it’s still a thing, but Game Maker is what I really got started on. The visual programming was good enough to get going until I eventually had to learn coding.
Ah it seems pretty cool. will loom into it. Thanks.
Code.org has some good program for teaching coding for free. Also check out Kahn Academy, and definitely Scratch - as others have mentioned.
Isn’t this what scratch is made for? Kids learning programming.
yep. Scratch is one option I’m considering.
Probably okay for the 10 year old but let the 6 year old find it by themselves if the sibling picks it up or try when they’re around 10yo.
Scratch is a fantastic entry point. That’s where I was put on the path for a software development career.
Someone else mentioned Lego. If you can find the Mindstorms robotics set, that would be a great place. I know they’re not cheap at retail and I don’t know if they’re still offered. But it’s a way to get introduced into visual coding but with a physical aspect still.
Heck, even a a Lego motor set like this and some gears and wheels will do a lot for problem solving skills.
Totally agree. I thought about robotics stuff a lot for them. They got hyped when I created a synth with a rpi pico. Maybe I’ll buy them an arduino kids robotics kit.
the benefit of the software first approach is that it costs nothing and shows them you don’t need to buy stuff to create things neccesarily.
Didn’t think of an Arduino kit but that would be a good low cost entry as well. You don’t even need to program it to start. Just basic circuits with switches and lights is a great education tool.
Lego. Build a tree fort. Let them play with friends and just be creative.
Lego is great. but they’re more into computers. I think them making a game of their own will really spark that spark within them. Legos are usually just models. You can’t interact with them that much.
You can definitely interact with them a lot. Beyond imaginative play (which kids love), you can also give Legos all kids of movement with articulation/technic pieces. The possibilities are quite literally endless. There’s a reason that there’s so many adults that are Lego enthusiasts.
I’m not the original poster but I think they meant the logo programming language. Basically you write a script which moves a turtle around on the screen and draws a line behind them.
It’s unrelated to the Lego plastic bricks
They definitely meant the bricks
Yeah bro, tossing a 6 year old in front of a computer screen to code is definitely a better plan.
This is some misguided helicopter parent shit. If they enjoy computers, then they’ll figure it out.
I am not too deep into the topic but I’d suggest like any game engine over a framework like love2d. Isnt godot like only dependant on coding for optimization (fact check me on this one)? If you want to stick with lua there are also a few options for game engines
Yeah I mostly agree. Godot seems too complex though. But I’ve never worked with it. Will give it a try.
In what sense do you mean Godot only needs code for optimization? How do you think it… becomes a game? Especially a particular game versus any other?
Maybe you’re using a different definition of coding though? Like maybe GDScript is scripting, and it’s only coding if it’s from the coding region of C#?
I haven’t used godot, so I only have some surface knowledge of it. One thing being that there are nodes, and that they are quite a powerful tool. Maybe these nodes can store some functions, in which case you only need to be able to write a function, but the structure and overall concept are not reliant on code (MAYBE, I do not know).
but op was mentioning love2d, which I have tried and it is only a framework based on the lua language. if you want to create an object, you have to code it. Which is why I refered op to an actual game engine which implements features to reduce the complexity of coding, being able to draw an object or node or whatever and give it function x as a property is way easier than using a framework.
Godot only needing code for optimization is just oversimplefied and not actually me knowing the engine. As far as I know the nodes lack performance compared to optimized code for the same task
Godot’s nodes do lots of stuff, but also nothing. They’re very modular, and from their tree structure and scene structure you can get away with not having to do a bunch of instantiation, which is nice. But they still only provide pieces of functionality, like animating some properties or detecting collisions, etc.
They’re handy, but they don’t contain any game logic in them, they’re just functionality. If you want to make a game, then you need to hook the collision detector to a function in the script for your node, and the function in the script needs to trigger a particular animation, etc.
The scripting language is similar to Python but different.
I like Godot, I think it’s a great visual editor for the visual stuff, but there’s definitely still programming in there. But it’s typically gentle programming, as much as it can be, with good editor integration and pretty good error messages and debugging, etc., in my experience.
