Too new to post links I think, but easy enough to find on google: alice - Alice was created by the guy who wrote The Last Lecture. Basically your kids start to learn basic programming concepts by using a visual drag and drop system to manipulate cool 3D objects like cats and bunnies and castles and airplanes pbskids - good stuff for little kids crayonphysics - One of the best pieces of educational software I've seen.
Thank you for this! It is awesome. My DS wants to be a game designer when he is older so this is right up his alley.
it would definately be good to get him into game dev early so that if he doesn't like it he won't spend a ton of time daydreaming about it just to figure out that it really isn't so great. I'm not saying that that is what'll happen, but thats how it went with me. after programming for a few years, i decided that the time it took to type in the code and then try and figure out where tiny little errors were orginating from in the code when visual studio would tell me that it was on one line of code but really it only thought that because i messed up on another line and i had to spend hours going through the code to figure out where one pesky little error was only to have to do the same thing a few hours later. At first i thought it was a nice brain worker, but eventually it got more and more tedious until 4 or 5 years in, after hours and hours and hours of doing it, i decided that programming was not for me. Of course, working with already existing game engines was nice but when it doesn't want to do something that you want it to then you have to come up with the code to make it and if you make a tiny little typing error in just one little part it can glitch the whole thing up, and it can take hours to find that error because it is just so small and there are sooo many lines of code. So it sounds like you're already encouraging him but i'd say make sure that he has the tools at his fingertips to really figure out if he likes working with games. Of course i still think it'd be fun to be one of the guys that actually come up with the ideas for the game and bark the orders out to the programmers . thats what i call a dream job
Where can you download this? The only place I could find to download something required something else to be installed, but it wasn't clear what the other thing was?
I seem to remember that any time i wanted to do programming on a new computer i'd need to download some microsoft framework SDK thing. i don't know if thats what its called or I'm missing something but i'm thinking its free but its required to program on a PC (dunno about macs, never used one). could be that. i thought computers these days came with it though, but maybe not. in any case it was a pretty big file. at least for my internet
