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They did this at my daughter's school. There is also ClickTeam Fusion as well.

Hopscotch
ClickTeam Fusion

Keep in mind, these are not programming languages but with Hopscotch for example it gets kids familiar with programming concepts like variables, looping and flow control in a fun way.

Normally, I'd recommend Scratch, but in this case, I recommend: MMF2, by François Lionet and Yves Lamoureux. They really get it, and your son will learn a ton about programming, without deviating from working on games themselves.

Coding isn't something someone else chooses for you, it's something you choose for himself. And it has NOTHING to do with him being a gamer. Relating "He likes to game" with "He will like to code games" is no less absurd than relating "He likes to game" with "He will like to be an electrician." Gaming and coding are two completely different things, only tangentially related by the thinnest of connections. At the very most, you might tell him that there is code behind his game. But if he is 14 and doesn't know that, he's probably too stupid to ever be a coder anyway (well, he might still be qualified to code for EA).

Yep. So, so true. But maybe he doesn't know if he'd like it?

Before I got into coding, I used to stumble upon game crashes. Then I'd figure out the exact way to invoke it, and theorize about the cause. More than a few times I was correct.

Someone tried to get me into programming, with C, but I wasn't interested. The language was too difficult. The syntax could be made far simpler, and yet do the exact same thing.

Eventually I stumbled upon TGF, and other Clickteam products. They let me create some of the games I had been dreaming up. It helped me build up an understanding of the mechanics. Then one day I decided to learn Java, and once I figured out the syntax, it was trivially easy implementing things with it.

Nobody knows how to write parsers anymore. I've never seen a recent university CS curriculum that covers parsing with respect to different parser constructs for different languages. Sure, the students learn to load up the chosen XML parsing library and pull in XML, and they learn to take text from stdin, but there's seldom any emphasis on what to do with more screwy formats. Maybe, just maybe, they might get exposed to different languages through a compilers class, but generally not how to process different languages outside of lex/yacc. This bothers me greatly.

Warning: Long rambling post follows. To summarize, I haven't found any courses that covered anything close to parsing, except maybe invoking XML parsing libraries and stuff.

Before I took any programming courses, I figured out how to create an XML parser in javascript. I had a dream of making a game, which needed server-side storage, but I never got around to finishing it. Quite an experiment, though.

After that I went on to help decode Outpost 2's compiled map format. (maps were DLL files - oh the design choices of old games!) I wrote an editor for it in Jamascript (a mirror of Javascript - see Clickteam), and wrote my own tile renderer with smooth scrolling. It worked quite well, except in XP SP2. Lack of further interest from the community caused that project to die, but got me interested in compiled languages - with a compiled language, I'd be in control of whether it worked on an OS or not.

So I decided I needed to learn a compiled language, but since I didn't like C, I started by porting my XML parser to Java, and added writing capabilities. I used it for some projects where I didn't need to deal with DOM nodes and stuff; I just needed to spit out data as XML <key>value</key> pairs, which it did just fine. Although the parser was simple(200 lines, max?), and couldn't read complex XML, it could generate valid simple XML, which any other parser could read. Oh, and it failed gracefully if the file was too advanced. (that was my biggest accomplishment, and required rethinking how I had designed it)

Then I changed it to pre-pend itself to other files as a sort of metadata. That way I could attach info like the number of frames, size of frames, etc. to a tileset PNG. You can see where I was going with this... I wanted to make a game. But somehow I got bored and stopped working on it again.

All this working with Java led me to a few inevitable conclusions. I just plain don't like some of Java's syntax verbosity. Some of the choices make the code stretch on and on and on, when readability could be enhanced by doing the opposite. I wrote a code pre-processor, to enable (among other things) keywords like public: and private: - also var, so that I could easily deal with statements like this:

public ArrayList<SomeObject> myList = new ArrayList<SomeObject>();
->
var myList = new ArrayList<SomeObject>();

It just felt cleaner to me - perhaps because of my javascript roots. I had a dream of creating an entire IDE, with background colours (changing based on scope, public/private, etc.), but I never actually got around to writing that... in the end I went back to other IDEs which lacked my features, but had stuff like code completion. (quite handy)

Now I'm working on many other projects - but I must say, I haven't encountered a course yet that covered any of this stuff. I'm probably looking at the wrong college courses, or maybe there's just not enough jobs that demand it? I had no trouble finding, Ruby, Python, Java, C#, and C++ courses, but none cover this stuff. I just had to tinker to learn it.

The problem is that they will not likely get a developer on board. Anyone that can sit down and write a game doesn't need help to do so.

Except in one case: You have the skill to make a 2D prototype of the design in Construct, The Games Factory, or even WarioWare DIY, but not to polish it as a native game.

One thing to think about is what programming projects he's interested in doing, and make sure he's set up for success. A lot of kids that age want to program games, but programming a real-time video game requires a *lot* of skills. Whatever project he wants to do, make sure you have a combination of OS, development environment, and libraries that will work.

This is a very good point, which is why I recommend MMF. (or even TGF) I started with it - it made creating games quite simple. At the same time I learned javascript which helped for webpages. Then one day I tried making a game in javascript. The game worked, but ran like shit, because Chrome didn't exist at the time. :P Shortly after that I started learning Java/C. I settled on Java, because of its strictness. Javascript is very lax, so although the syntax looks like C, you can't do any of the same stuff in actual C. And C has an extra symbol for every single command. Java kept it simpler. (just dots, no & * ** :: -> . etc.)

Looking back, I'd probably go with Python this time around. All my java code going back years (before looking into Python) matches Python indentation.

How about teaching people to write algorithms ?

You are a smart man. (or woman)

I can't count the number of times I've just stared at someone coding something, and wondered what the heck they were trying to do. We'd be much better off if programming courses had more problem solving. It doesn't even have to be difficult languages - before I started coding, I spent years making stuff with TGF/MMF - when it was finally time to learn something more low-level, like SDL, I already had all the concepts necessary to throw together a simple 2D platformer, before I had even learned a language.

I don't consider myself an amazing programmer, but I know enough to get the job done. Many things stump me, but 2D games never have, so I really do believe learning the concepts (and getting results) before learning the implementation helped.

Also: Double-buffered clip-pane 2D renderer! Woot!

http://www.clickteam.com/ they've been making programs like this since Klik & Play in the mid 90s

A quick scan of the comments didn't mention this, so I thought I would. Clickteam make a set of 2d games and application creation programs, called "The Games Factory 2" and "Multimedia Fusion 2" specifically designed to be easy to use. They're trying hard to push their products to the education market, so you might want to take a look.

It should be possible to write a program such that you can easily develop a game.

Clickteam makes such products, but those work only on PCs, not consoles or handhelds.

I'd recommend the Clickteam The Games Factory 1.0 / Multimedia Fusion 1.5 software line. TGF is pretty old now and you can pick some copies up for free but MMF is its advanced bigger brother, with a lot more features and a more professional direction. You might want to get TGF to start with then move on to MMF when you find TGF's limitations. Both Clickteam products are great for learning fundamentals and the fact that programming is arranged into a grid means that there is very little typing involved, things are mainly point and click. You will find that you can make quite complex programs, with the help of the freely-available extensions. It is a nice way of getting into programming and can aid in learning the building blocks that the user will encounter if they attempt to learn more complex, less visual programming languages.

I'd recommend the Clickteam The Games Factory 1.0 / Multimedia Fusion 1.5 software line. TGF is pretty old now and you can pick some copies up for free but MMF is its advanced bigger brother, with a lot more features and a more professional direction. You might want to get TGF to start with then move on to MMF when you find TGF's limitations. Both Clickteam products are great for learning fundamentals and the fact that programming is arranged into a grid means that there is very little typing involved, things are mainly point and click. You will find that you can make quite complex programs, with the help of the freely-available extensions. It is a nice way of getting into programming and can aid in learning the building blocks that the user will encounter if they attempt to learn more complex, less visual programming languages.

I'd recommend the Clickteam The Games Factory 1.0 / Multimedia Fusion 1.5 software line. TGF is pretty old now and you can pick some copies up for free but MMF is its advanced bigger brother, with a lot more features and a more professional direction. You might want to get TGF to start with then move on to MMF when you find TGF's limitations. Both Clickteam products are great for learning fundamentals and the fact that programming is arranged into a grid means that there is very little typing involved, things are mainly point and click. You will find that you can make quite complex programs, with the help of the freely-available extensions. It is a nice way of getting into programming and can aid in learning the building blocks that the user will encounter if they attempt to learn more complex, less visual programming languages.

Do Clickteam's The Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion count as programming?

Do Clickteam's The Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion count as programming?

There is a neat little freeware utility called SynchronX that will syncronize any two folders in Windows.

Objedt orientated, event based programming made easy. Its so easy. I used to use this program a lot. You can even make the games playable online with the Vitalize! Plug-in. See the V-cade to see how!

Get something like Multimedia Fusion. Its easy to learn and has a lot of included graphics/sounds to use in games. There's also older "versions" of it out there, like Corel Click & Create, The Games Factory, and the original, Maxis's Klik & Play

http://www.clickteam.com/English/tgf.htm

You might want to look at The Games Factory. If that doesn't suit you, check out this site which has various abandonware games for free download, including the Pinball Construction set.

You should try Klik n' Play. My friend used it to make some intresting games when he was younger. And it looks like they have a version for schools that's free to use too.

You should try Klik n' Play. My friend used it to make some intresting games when he was younger. And it looks like they have a version for schools that's free to use too.

klik'n'create (and its little brother klik'n'play) grew up to become The Games Factory (very similar to KnP). There's a new nifty-looking 3D one from the same people called Jamagic, which abandons KnP/TGFs "point and drool" pseudo-programming in favour of javascript [pseudo-programming]. Jamagic and TGF are available from clickteam.com

Klik'n Play is available here.

They also have something called The Games Factory which I haven't tried yet.

nah dont get darkbasic get jamagic its like javascript but 3d. here Supposedly they are making a linux version soon.

However, note that The Neverhood [Chronicles] is a hard-to-find game that regularly changes hands for no less than $40 on eBay. Whereas, say, Klik & Play is $9 (and free for schools).