How To Teach Programming To Kids, Via XBox

An anonymous reader writes "Chris Wilson reviews Kodu, the new XBox game that he calls 'Logo on Steroids.' The game allows you to build a world and program every object in it with an in-house graphical language, making the game a primitive example of 'reactive state machines' in a 'multi-agent concurrent system.' It sounds like what we call 'application specific integrated circuits' in engineering, where every line of code runs in parallel."

Comments

adults?

[sopssa]

This is actually quite interesting. First time I came across state machines was in Max Payne level editor, which was something fantastic for a creator-minded / "lets try out what this shit can do" person like me. Now I'm mainly a programmer / game developer, but I always love to mess around with things and create fun things quickly just to see what they can do.

Too bad its mainly made for kids, there's not enough such toys for us adults :) However just out of the interest I guess I'll be getting this anyways (yeah, obviously for my kids that will born in ~5 years)

Re:adults?

[JustKidding]

There are plenty of toys for adults, and you don't even need an Xbox for that. Just pick up a FPGA development board, and start coding stuff in VHDL or Verilog or something. Throw in a microcontroller, buy an oscilloscope and logic analyser, and you're good to go!

Re:adults?

[ProzacPatient]

Too bad its mainly made for kids, there's not enough such toys for us adults :)

Actually there sort of is, it's called Garry's Mod.
If you link it up with a third party mod called "WireMod" you can do all kinds of crazy stuff in the game by wiring things together, besides what you can do outside the game with Lua scripting.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/4000/

Re:adults?

[similar_name]

There are plenty of toys for adults

There are indeed.

Just say NO to Logo on steriods

[Anonymous Coward]

Your turtle shrinks.

Re:This isn't programming.

[FiveDozenWhales]

It's elementary programming--as TFA states, you define rules for the behavior of objects and the interactions between objects.

While this certainly isn't as nitty-gritty as Logo, it still introduces kids to the ideas of determining conditions, and processes to undergo under those conditions, a very important concept in programming. It also introduces them to an object-oriented environment.

Maybe it doesn't "teach programming to kids," but with any luck it will get them interested and excited enough about this kind of thing to pursue it academically... and maybe even give them a very basic foundation of skills.

programming without typing?

[davek]

My first program was in 1991 on a TI-something:

print hello

this came with a syntax error. My second program was

print "hello"

And it worked. Over a decade later, I'm still programming. I'm not really convinced that "game" based programming systems do anything to inspire the young programmer. I say put them in front of a blinking cursor, the apt ones will just get it.

Re:programming without typing?

[stevied]

Mine was something similar, but a few years earlier on a borrowed ZX Spectrum, and a few months later a BBC B+.

I don't know about you, but there were less "distractions" in my childhood - for example, only 4 TV channels, and I didn't watch that much. I spent a lot of time reading (books) - including under the bed covers with a torch when I wasn't supposed to be.

Modern kids have a lot distractions available - multi-channel TV (usually available in their rooms), PC or console based games, mobiles, the internet .. if we're going to get them hooked, we might have to use something that's more obviously visually appealing, and easier to get into with the systems they already have around them. It might seem depressing (especially to those of us who already feel like old-timers before they've reached 35), but sometimes you have to bend to reality a little.

And on the positive side, they have python available to them to progress to. Beats the crap out of any form of BASIC on the elegance and features front ..

Re:programming without typing?

[ug333]

Personally, this attitude drives me nuts. Sure, the kids with a real natural love for it will pick it up no matter what interface you put in front of them. But you will hook MORE if you provide them something entertaining to get them interested. There are two major bars to clear: one to initially get interested in the profession and the second is to become a professional. I want the first bar low and the second bar high. There is plenty of time in the middle to filter out those people who lack the necessary skills. Trying to filter them up front is going to filter out some potentially good developers.

Re:programming without typing?

[dvice_null]

"10 PRINT "HELLO ";
20 GOTO 10 ...and brought me 28 years later where I am now."

You are still in the loop?

Need reading glasses

[HangingChad]

I first read the article title as How To Program Kids Via XBOX.

That would have gotten me right into console gaming.

Re:This isn't programming.

[ciderVisor]

programming thanks to ZZT

Cos every girl's crazy 'bout a C#-dressed man.

Re:Isn't this just a level editor?

[JimboFBX]

I think what he means is that is it more like the warcraft 3 level editor than programming, in which case I think the answer is "yes", although in reality it sounds like it is more like a 3d Klik and Play. For example, I don't forsee the ability to write to a file and read from a file or create complicated data structures as being features.

Not available in my country

[KDR_11k]

I really want Kodu just for some prototyping and maybe messing around (5€ is a nice price for that IMO) but it's only available in countries which have the community games available which doesn't include Germany (presumably because of the enforced age ratings that no community games will have so they'd effectively be 18+). I wish MS hadn't thrown it on the community games system and instead gone for plain XBLA.

Teaches game logic, not programming

[jjl]

I don't think these kind of approaches really teach programming. Programming is so much more about the structure of a whole program down to the minute details and everything in between, including the strict syntax.

These game-oriented things are great, but what one learns with them is basically just a certain way how logic how object and AI interaction can work in games. And the logic is input using a finely crafted UI.

Re:Teaches game logic, not programming

[revlayle]

You make programming sound like some elitist club that only a few can joined and only if they do it the right way. I would say programming is totally useless with the ability to do any sort of logic processing.

Any tool that allows to execute some arbitrary set of rules on a computing platform based on a series of log process would constitute as programming to me. Syntax is truly just semantics here. "Strict syntax"?? - are you a Python programmer or something? (sorry... some languages are just not strict, well, to me - esp. those with no type safety, I would argue the language at that moment, would be pretty lax) ;) What is to say a visual programming language could not exist and be, ultimately just as powerful as anything with "keywords" and symbols to define branches, loops and entities?

This tool the article talks about may not be it... yet. Who is to say it couldn't evolve into such a tool that dwarfed many "traditional" languages in capabilities.

Any tool - text-based, graphic-based, hell, anything-based that could provide an excellent programming/development platform would be interesting to me. Any on that can teach logic AND programming at the same time would be beyond awesome.

Re:Teaches game logic, not programming

[aj50]

That finely crafted UI is a strict syntax, it's just designed in such a way that you can't write anything invalid.

Is there really any difference between typing the keyword FORWARD followed by the argument 10 and dragging a FORWARD block and then moving a slider?

Personally I'd say it's analogous to the difference between a menu driven GUI and a command line. Both can accomplish the same things but the GUI might be more discoverable and thus easier to learn whereas the command line lets you get things done more quickly.