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?
I have a son that’s about to turn 6 now. Since the age of two I’ve been playing with him with Cubetto https://primotoys.com/. Cubetto is a no-screen programming of a robot using physical directional shapes.
When I help them with a playful narrative (I’ve even written an article about it), he and his friends enjoyed it a lot. They play with moving it around.
However, my observation is that at this age they are not ready for the more advanced feature of reexecutable code (the Cubetto board has this equivalent of a callable procedure). They struggle even with the simpler random or invert commands (which are an extension pack actually).
One nice thing is that there is a learning path towards disassembling the robot and potentially (unofficially) towards reprogramming its Arduino. So kids can also tinker with at later age.
As you can see, I’m quite enthusiastic about the technology and could share some further resources, if anyone cares to read them.
This is great, although not available in my region. I’ll see if I can find one.
thanks for sharing. I have played similar games with them with cards and toys. On a grid. Pretty much exactly the same as this but manual. I execute their code and move the character.
This gives them good understanding of what a program is. What an ibterpreter/compiler is and what is execution.
I would also love to drive them more towards mathematical thinking and functional programming instead of procedural and object oriented thinking.
Regarding your last point, I totally share that disposition, but I’d think math/functional is a different type of skill/competence and its basics have way too little to do with computers. Probably the most relevant here is that pure dynamically typed languages like smalltalk, logo, python and JavaScript (the ones that you’ll probably end up teaching anyway) are so versatile that they successfully implement both the functional and object-oriented paradigms, so you can choose how to look at them.
One thing that’s pretty cool about your case of having two kids of different ages is that you can make them play a sort of an asymmetric ping-pong game where one becomes the game master/designer to the other.