[portland] learn to program / robots game?

[kirby urner]

On 9/6/07, jason kirtland <jek at discorporate.us> wrote:


> That game is long gone (it's been 25 years?  yow.), but I still
> think that or something like it is a great introduction, especially
> for an isolated but interested student.  I've made a cursory
> inspection of current variants and I didn't turn up any actively
> maintained descendants that appealed to me.  The big modern one is
> Java, and I've got misgivings about the accessibility of that one
> for programming beginners.

Game Maker, which is maybe your "big modern one" is by many
accounts quite good, popular with Portland kids, big at
Saturday Academy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Maker

This one is also popular, more in the tank genre:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-robocode/

Pygame is good too, though of course quite low level,
just above C++.  You have to know how to write game logic
already.  So maybe cut your teeth on something else first.

A lot depends if it's really *game programming* a person wants
to learn, or just wants more opportunities to play games, but
"learning programming" sounds more like what the dominant
big people culture wants to hear.

Not that it has to be either/or.

Ten is pretty young though.

Has anyone checked ToonTalk lately?
Way more surreal than Squeak, but still good.

http://www.toontalk.com/

I'd also recommend this Tux Droid I'd like to demo on 911 (for
under 5 minutes).  Crunchy speaks excellent Python (that's
my name for her).

Kirby