[Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

[Ivan Krstić]

On Jul 8, 2007, at 3:12 PM, Winston Wolff wrote:
> I've been thinking about old programming games like
> Core Wars and Robot Wars and would like to make some newer version
> like that.

I've been encouraging this from the OLPC angle, since games like  
these would work very well in our mesh environment.

I got my eight-graders some years ago hooked on Cybugs (now called AI  
Wars, http://www.tacticalneuronics.com/content/aiw3dnew.asp) before  
teaching "real" programming in BASIC. By the time we got to BASIC,  
many concepts were familiar because the kids had looked at dozens of  
Cybugs they could find online and that they made among themselves.  
They were quite competitive about the whole thing, which drove their  
curiosity, which in turn got them looking at hundreds and hundreds of  
lines of code printouts -- in their own time, and of their own  
volition. I have yet to find another approach to teaching programming  
that manages to do the same :)

Cheers,

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org