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'CodeSpells' Video Game Teaches Children Java Programming
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."
38 of the 40 girls in the test group complained that, once they were written in Java, the spells took forever to execute.
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.
The entire game looks pretty basic - and who the heck cares? Watch a two year old and see what happens when you give em a present. They are as likely to play in the big box as with the toy.
Graphics might be important for the latest 3D shooter, but a good game doesn't HAVE to have cutting edge graphics. A game with amazing graphics can still be crap.
If the idea is to teach kids how to code, and they enjoy playing the game enough to at least learn a little coding - then it is a GREAT product. If I was ten and wanted to learn java and had a choice of following tutorials/reading books/etc or playing a game that taught me the concepts, then I certainly know how I would have learned java. Sure, all my projectst might also include a random "Save the GNOMES!!" routine, but you know..
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Pointers really are complicated for anyone IQ 110 or below. Most people who attempt CS weed out classes are above average, but half struggle with pointers.
That's why Java has builtin garbage collection, DUH!
Yeah, you go ahead and explain loops and conditional statements to 40 10-year-olds. They'll learn it in 5, master it in 10, forget all about it in 15. They'll probably be bored, too.
Or you can use a software like this which will engage them, encourage them, and help them remember it when they go home that night. It sure would be a shame if they were excited to learn more the next day and had a platform that was there to teach them and give you time to grade their math tests.
Gee, when you talk to people that never learned programming they know nothing about programming. If you are having trouble explaining it then the problem might not be on their side.
Perhaps to someone who has been trained in C but not Java. The biggest problems with C when compared against Java is the limited extent of its standard library, sorting through the plethora of poorly documented non-standard libraries that are available (vs Java, where if there isn't a standard for it, then the next obvious stop is apache.org) and the fact that you need to understand the hardware architecture of the system you are developing for in a lot of cases, as well as distinctions between stack and heap and a bunch of low level gotchas in the language that are far from obvious to the newbie, or even to experienced developers sometimes.
I wish I had mod points right now.
One of the best things I ever had as a kid was a TRS-80 (CoCo - and not a true TRS-80 either, even though that was stamped on it) that booted to a BASIC interpreter. The code for any games I loaded directly off disk could be tinkered with easily, no need to compile. This was awesome as a curious 5 year old.
Even better about it were the games "Rocky's Boots" and "Robot Odyssey". These games taught me the basics of digital electronics, lessons which have actually helped in my current career as a technician (with no formal training in digital logic). Seeing this kind of software being produced in a modern setting is awesome, I wish there was more of it.
The reason that Java isn't as fun to program is the same reason that it's good for businesses. The language is very restrictive and prescriptive of how you should do things. For programmers that want flexibility and power, the constraints and extra typing (dual-meaning intended) chafe. But when you're using it as part of a large group, those same constraints become the things you can depend on. Where is a certain class located? Java requires it to be in a certain directory. What methods are available on a class? Java's static type system was designed to make tooling easy, so your IDE will tell you. And even talented programmers can mess up manual memory management...the less-talented wouldn't stand a chance without Java's memory management. The list of things that Java prevents you from screwing up is quite long.
Basically, for my home coding projects and projects where I work with a small team of talented developers, Java is one of my last choices. But for my boring 9-5 job where I'm working with 30 knuckle-draggers who don't understand the purpose of an interface, let alone how to write functional code that's easy to read, I want them writing Java and I'm willing to pay the Java price to get that.
Irony of ironies, C# is almost exactly like Java at the language level, only with a totally different object hierarchy, which is why it's easier for UI development. The .NET hierarchy is somewhat influenced by classic VB, which was a very well-developed and efficient (if sometimes limiting) format for expressing common UI needs.
Java's popularity, sadly, has to do exactly with that OOP evangelism. In the late eighties and early nineties, academic software engineers were absolutely convinced OOP was the silver-bullet software development paradigm for all ills, since encapsulation (hiding methods) made code re-use practical. They also believed it was the end to all programming practices that inhibited re-use, particularly global variables. Unfortunately they made the mistake of conflating these practices with "laziness," and very mistakenly believed in a bizarrely Victorian fashion that all beginners should be forced to use only best practices, as though we should be teaching infants proper manners straight out of the crib.
It's stupid enough that I sometimes wonder if it was a massive conspiracy by Sun's marketing department, but to be honest computing has always been full of fads like this. In the early eighties, logic programming was The Way Of The Future; everyone thought that Prolog and constraint-satisfaction-based expert systems (basically, fancy predicate logic expression solvers) would dominate computing for the rest of time. Today, there are only a few niches where new Prolog code is considered desirable.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
In other words, "Java is for other people." I feel the same way: I used to hate Java, but now I respect it for the reasons you just described.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
At the elementary level I don't think the choice of language with reference to the business environment is that important. Teaching kids that they can make their computer/tablet/whatever DO STUFF and presenting it in an easy to digest format is much more valuable that what is big in the industry now. Keep in mind, elementary age... at least 20 years (on average) until they start rolling to the job market. Not all of them will be programmers. The languages we use now may be dying by that point. they may not all be programmers, some may be scientists using more focused languages in the vein of Matlab, some may be homemakers, some may be athletes, some may be artists. But they will all have an appreciation for technology and what it can do. They will all get introduced to logic and algorithmic structure at a much earlier age than is normal right now. Those things easily apply to other aspects of life. Hell, if they keep at programming strictly on a hobby basis, they may even catch on to when the developers at their company/organization/whatever are BS'ing them about what can and cannot be accomplished.
Try tekkit for minecraft, it will give you a mod called computercraft which will allow you to place computers with consoles on the map and even hook up wireless modems and a disk drive to them. Using lua you can then program these computers to do whatever you want basically, me and my brother made 3 train stations which would handle carts and track switches with the computers. You can even program "bots" with lua and have them build structures and whatnot. They can even defend your area if you want. All this is done with lua inside the minecraft game. You can of course import larger scripts from outside the game since typing them in the console minecraft provides can take a while.
Anveto
I feel like my signature is very relevant today.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.