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 ..

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.