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'CodeSpells' Video Game Teaches Children Java Programming

Posted by samzenpus on from the get-in-upstairs-and-play-your-games dept.

CyberSlugGump writes "Computer scientists at UC San Diego have developed a 3D first-person video game designed to teach young students Java programming. In CodeSpells, a wizard must help a land of gnomes by writing spells in Java. Simple quests teach main Java components such as conditional and loop statements. Research presented March 8 at the 2013 SIGCSE Technical Symposium indicate that a test group of 40 girls aged 10-12 mastered many programming concepts in just one hour of playing."

2 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. had a similar idea some time ago. by wierd_w · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I had a similar idea some time ago, but with an MMORPG setting.

    One of the issues that has always rankled me hard was the "cookie cutter" nature of the world events in those games, as well as the limiting gameplay options, so I had this idea for "obfuscated and sigilized" programming syntax as the basis for a game's magic system. Rather than presenting a loop as a nested block of instructions, it would depict it as a "container", with subcomponents inside. Kind of a mix of flowcharting and stylized syntax.

    The idea was that the layout of the "enchantment" could be moved and teased to make clever images out of the interconnected containers and symbolic representations, to make the programmatical nature of the system less banal, and much more aesthetically attractive, while simultanously making the kinds of magic and counter magic highly diverse and dynamic.

    I never really did much with the idea (ideas aren't worth much, despite what the USPTO and several shell corps may claim. Implementations are far more valuable.), and all the "on paper" mental models I tried kept having non-trivial problems.

    I like seeing that somebody had a similar idea, and made a working implementation.

  2. Re:not a complete success by Kagato · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yeah, that's fairly outdated thinking. Speed isn't derived by the language anymore. It's the execution that counts. Java Compiles down to op-code, which is run in the JVM. The JVM has decades worth of run-time optimizations. The majority of large scale web sites are written in Java.

    Hey, ever heard of Hadoop. You know the large scale Map-reduce framework based on Google's technology that sorts terabyte and petabyte of data? Java.