Ask Slashdot: Tools For Teaching High School Kids How To Make Games?

First time accepted submitter nzyank writes "The other day I bravely (foolishly?) volunteered to conduct a video game development workshop at my boys' HS. This in Smallsville, Vermont with an average graduating class size of about 20. The idea is to meet once a week and actually create a game, start to finish. It will be open to would-be programmers, designers, artists, etc. I worked on a bunch of AAA titles back in the '90s, but I'm pretty much out of touch nowadays and I'm trying to figure out the best approach. The requirements are that it has to be one of either Windows/XBox or Android, since those are the platforms that I am current on. It has to be relatively simple for the kids to get up and running quickly, and it needs to be as close to free as possible. Teaching them to use stuff like Blender, C#, C++, Java, XNA, OpenGL and the Android SDK is probably a bit much. I was thinking of something like the Torque Engine, but they want $1000 for an academic license, which is never going to happen. I simply don't know what's out there nowadays and could really use some suggestions."

Comments

Unity3D

[claytongulick]

Unity is pretty much the best option. It is cross platform, easy to develop in, and has everything you need to get started fast. The documentation is excellent, the community is supportive and the entry-level version is free. Unity

Re:Unity3D

[NoSleepDemon]

I agree with this, the University I work at runs a game development workshop for 12-17 year olds(ish) that runs for an entire semester, we bring in a lot of big guns from the industry to give them talks as well and next year we're thinking of giving some of the better developers internships at our studio. We've found that Unity3D is a pretty excellent tool for people learning to program, it's also a pretty excellent tool in general, and we use it for our commercial projects as well. I do of course have some gripes with it, for a start the interface is pretty awful (prefabs aren't at all intuitive and nesting them doesn't work right) and source control is a NIGHTMARE - you pretty much need to have the pro version which allows you to turn on the "make my unity project not cause my version control system to tear its eyes out" option or your project's associations will break each time you distribute a new build. - most of the youngsters won't care about that but you're almost guaranteed that one of them will :)

Re:javascript tetris

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried this once, it is hell. You are teaching HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JavaScript interaction with CSS, and possibly jquery as well. I was not successful.

Re:Best suggestion is Kodu

[arth1]

I say you start in the wrong end. When I was younger, high school kids made demos in assembly language. Quite impressive ones too. Without toolkits, IDEs, or any kind of pre-chewed food.

IMNSHO, schools should always teach low level fundamentals, never high level implementations, no matter what classes. Because the latter will change, while the fundamentals will still be valuable ten years from now when they hit the job market, as they can be applied to any high level implementations.

This teaching kids solutions that will be outdated by the time they graduate, and not the background needed for them to derive answers themselves, is, I believe, part of what's wrong with schools today.