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How To Get a Game-Obsessed Teenager Into Coding?
looseBits writes "I have a friend whose 14-year-old son spends all his time gaming, like any normal teenager. However, my friend would like to find a more productive interest for him and asked me how to get him into coding. When I started coding, it was on the Apple II, and one could quickly write code that was almost as interesting as commercially available software. Now, times have changed and it would probably take years of study if starting from scratch to write something anyone would find mildly interesting. Does anyone have experience in getting their children into programming? How did you keep them interested if the only thing they can do after a week is make the computer count to 10 and dump it on the screen?"
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).
My advice? Politely tell your friend to ask his son what *HE* wants to do with his life. If the kid's answer is something reasonable (i.e. not "rap star," "sports legend," or "professional gamer"), then your friend should help the kid explore *that* profession, and not just assume that he's destined to be a programmer just because he likes to game. Programming is not the kind of thing you get into because some putz friend of your father's goads you into it.
Ironically, when I got into coding, my parents tried to goad me *OUT* of it (because I would code for hours at a time and they wanted me to at least go outside). Now that is how you know you're meant to do something!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Find a game with good modding potential, and show them what they can do. The early ID games were where I started my programming, with simple scripts. Once you learn you can change things, the next thing is creating new things.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
How do you get a kid into coding? Guess.
Mind altering drugs?
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
How do you get a kid into coding? Guess.
Take them outside, throw an exception to them and ask them to throw it back?
Get him into game modding. If the kid plays WoW, the modding community is great, and it was the only thing that made me endure the game for a year. WoW uses LUA, which is a great and easy to use language, couple with XML for interfaces and data transfer.
Another option is creating mods and maps for Civilization IV. With Civ V coming this year, with even better modding potential, this is really worth a shot. Otherwise, try to check what is writable for whatever the kid is playing. Coupling the gaming experience with the more "productive" time codding, is his better shot.
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
Calm down already, it's a 14-year-old. Give him a chance to try it at least.
10 PRINT "FUCK"
20 GOTO 10
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I think anyone who spends a lot of time on games past about 16 years needs some help growing up. The need to play so much indicates (to me) that they don't have enough interesting, more important things to think about.
I think you may want to check the main target demographics for every $300+ console since the PS1.
Also, "important" is subjective. Unless you're the president, the pope, or a nobel prize winning physicist, chances are the stuff you're working on that you think is "important" is probably not worth a hill of beans to the rest of humanity at large.
If he's the type to play games, nothing can compete with the fun of a video game. You don't know what you're up against. People literally, literally, abandon their lives for World of Warcraft. Life isn't very fun you know, especially for a teenager (treated like second-class citizens, zero assets and completely dependent on parents, most available jobs border on psychologically unendurable, plus all the stresses of trying to figure out what the world is all about etc).
Part of being a parent and raising your child is making use of available resources, including discussion forums, to get information about your child's situations and possible ways of dealing with them.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
Tell him under no circumstances is he allowed to program. Should work with most teenagers.
Lesson The Second:
10 INPUT "What is your name? : ", U$
20 PRINT "Fuck you "; U$
30 GOTO 20
It's a free and open-source Quake-like FPS. Usually the progression goes like this: Playing -> Mapping -> Scripting -> Coding. I've seen that progression played out several times in the community and myself (full disclosure: I moderate the forums and Quadropolis.us, the primary source for maps, mods, etc.).
Mapping is done in real time and in-game. A mere tap of the E key will switch between editing and playing, so you can see and test what you're doing immediately.
It's also designed to be light on resources. I use the (very underpowered!) open-source radeon driver to drive my Radeon X1600 Pro, and I can get a consistent 30 FPS with the eyecandy barely dialed back.
For a little more detail, here's the description from cubeengine.com:
NOOOOOOOOOOOO! "GOTO" is EEEEEEVILLLLLLLLLL!
Just the opposite. Far more kids were interested in science and programming back in the days when the chemistry set could burn or blow your fingers off, and the use of unprotected GOTO's, peeks, poke, and global variables could crash your computer a zillion different ways. Choosing safety has taken all the fun out of play.
Teach the kid how to program in BASIC. Bill Gates and Woz can be his role models. What teenage kid has heard of or wants to be Djiskstra?
I think anyone who spends a lot of time on games past about 16 years needs some help growing up.
Which, presumably, would not be true of people who spend their time reading books, watching films, playing golf, etc..
The old "my leisure activity is superior to your leisure activity" nonsense, eh?
The need to play so much indicates (to me) that they don't have enough interesting, more important things to think about.
Oh. So is this more the "leisure activities are a complete waste of time" variety of nonsense?
Okay, so I see your post above, talking about how you'd rather be a 'maker' than a 'consumer'. And that's fine. Obviously, you can't be a maker all the time. You probably live in a house that someone else built out of materials that someone else produced using machinery that someone else made... etc. And that's fine. Most of us don't make everything we have from basic principles. Relatively few people probably make anything at all, outside of the requirements of their job. But it's not a bad goal to have, to be creative and productive in your free time.
What I take issue with, though, is saying that reading a fiction book is 'just' entertainment. Is there nothing we can learn from fiction? I studied creative writing as an undergraduate student; required to be a good writer is to be a good reader. In that sense, as I consume fiction, I'm strengthening my own base of experience for composition. And I'm not a writer who thinks that genre fiction is necessarily all rubbish. I certainly think we can learn from, say, a Dan Brown book, even though he doesn't have the canonical blessing of Dickens or Thoreau or Homer, or whoever. It doesn't mean we should emulate him, but any experience is an opportunity to learn.
And that's really my point: it's not about whether or not fiction is a frivolous use of time, it's that there are a lot of things out there that people scoff at as being 'just' entertainment, but all of these things have something to teach us. Consuming and experiencing the works of others, even in areas that we don't traditionally think of as high art, are vital parts of the creative process.
Would any of us remember Warhol if not for his inspiration by such otherwise utterly mundane things as Campbell's Soup? Where would Lichtenstein have been without comic books, which are, even today, derided as a waste of time?
Entertainment is only 'just' entertainment if you learn nothing from it and refuse to be creative, yourself. Like it or not, video games and fiction are a large part of our culture. Our immersion in this culture informs our creative choices. If we spend too much of our time consuming, it interferes with our own expressions of creativity, and that's a problem. But I don't think you should feel guilty for spending an afternoon at a book, as long as you possess the analytical ability to take something from the experience. And if you don't have that ability, you probably wouldn't feel guilty about it, anyway.
You know....I think once you start being concerned with "So much time wasted" when you were younger, you may be taking yourself too seriously (unless you seriously had a gaming/other problem). In my high school/college years I spent a lot of time playing video games, playing D&D/strategy board games, playing basketball, fishing, and getting fucking wasted. None of those activities are really helping me succeed in life, but I ENJOYED them.
I guess if you intend to be the worlds greatest coder/golfer/singer/whatever you need to start early and spend an inordinate amount of time focused on your goal. The rest of us who just want to enjoy life and work at a halfway decent job are going to have time to fritter away. If I had spent my youth simply preparing for adulthood I would be a lot more disappointed in myself.
You and TFA are talking about completely different things when you say "beginner programmer". You mean someone with maybe 6 months university-level tuition - hell, in my course we didn't cover Dijkstra's algorithm and A* until I think third year. TFA is talking about 'beginner' as in 'a program is a series of instructions'. Speaking as someone who wanted to learn to program since I was about 12, I made several attempts to get started and found it way too boring each time. Once I typed some old games into our BBC Micro from a magazine but I had no idea what the code meant. It wasn't until I was about 16 that it 'clicked' and I started understanding how to code.
As for teaching yourself to program as a teenager, that's the one common aspect among all the people I know who are truly good, 'natural' programmers. We all taught ourselves. And that's what I'd say to TFA: Don't try to 'make him interested', let him develop his own interest. Don't stress if he's not writing FPS games at 12. The absolute best way to make anyone hate ANYTHING is to nag them into doing it.
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