And we all know that the best way to get secure reliable code is to continue patching bad designs again and again. And of course this will never lead to more bugs in already flawed code will it ?
I wrote a text game on a C64 in basic but then text games weren't all that odd. These days kids live immersed in multimedia and I just don't think you can hold their attention without the promise of graphics.
Initially my thought was... if they're 11 - 13 start them with C or C++.
On reflection though perhaps there are too many hurdles re: graphics and there are certainly a whole host of problems relating to memory leakage, buffer overflows etc that you probably don' really want to burden them with so....
Get them to learn Java. The JDK is free. They can deploy their apps on the web for their friends to look at. It's sandboxed and garbage collected. Graphics are easy and you can even go up to 3d if they get caught up in it. Interest in Java is still pretty high enough to maybe stoke their interest. There are tonnes of docs in print and online. In particular the Java Tutorial is a good web read (wouldn't buy the book doesn't work as well in print form IMHO) but there are tonnes of other code snippets, tutorial type examples around.
In my view one of the hardest things is thinking of a simple enough graphics program that they can work on so you might want to start with breakout or something like that. I had a lot of success with 14 - 15 year olds writing a ping pong type game in basic but a lot of them just could get their heads around the fact that bouncing off an obstacle was an illusion to be simulated by the programmer. One of the old time favourites was snake and I think that Nokia has ressurected that one so a Java game of snake might have all the elements you need ie. graphics, can play one player, wouldn't be too big, would be a good task to get them writing loops and incrementing decrementing variables for snake size etc.
Other things your might try are visualisation of objects in 3D. I also had some sucess (ie. high level of enthusiasm) getting some 11 - 12 year olds to write fragments of code to display polyhedra. The 3d illusion really got them.
I think though that you needed to get kids onto some graphics say two or three years ago because that was the big thing. Now I think you're really going to need to address network connectivity and multiplay so here's another idea. Dad could write a little tcp server with a simple text protocol that relayed messages to clients that were connected and stick it on the web. Kids could write clients that talked to each other by connecting to the server. Once they had a session going they could flee the mother ship and continue on their own or continue to route via a forked process on the server (you choose). The advantage here is that a) Dad gets to do something for them codewise that they can actually use b) they can write applets as simple as two (or more) person chats through to graphically based multiplayer games. Once they exhaust the limits of the awt in Java there's the 2d stuff and then the 3d stuff. Also down the track if Dad's server is in C then the kids can get the source and try and overflow the buffer and smash the stack just for fun.
If they get tired of Java get them onto C, C++ with openGL which will get them producing 3D in no time.
Well there are just a few random thoughts that were floating around in my skull. Hope your kids have fun ! I look forward to the day when my daughter can get into some of this stuff.
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yeah right !
And we all know that the best way to get secure reliable code is to continue patching bad designs again and again. And of course this will never lead to more bugs in already flawed code will it ?
Duh !!
I wrote a text game on a C64 in basic but then text games weren't all that odd. These days kids live immersed in multimedia and I just don't think you can hold their attention without the promise of graphics.
... if they're 11 - 13 start them with C or C++.
....
Initially my thought was
On reflection though perhaps there are too many hurdles re: graphics and there are certainly a whole host of problems relating to memory leakage, buffer overflows etc that you probably don' really want to burden them with so
Get them to learn Java. The JDK is free. They can deploy their apps on the web for their friends to look at. It's sandboxed and garbage collected. Graphics are easy and you can even go up to 3d if they get caught up in it. Interest in Java is still pretty high enough to maybe stoke their interest. There are tonnes of docs in print and online. In particular the Java Tutorial is a good web read (wouldn't buy the book doesn't work as well in print form IMHO) but there are tonnes of other code snippets, tutorial type examples around.
In my view one of the hardest things is thinking of a simple enough graphics program that they can work on so you might want to start with breakout or something like that. I had a lot of success with 14 - 15 year olds writing a ping pong type game in basic but a lot of them just could get their heads around the fact that bouncing off an obstacle was an illusion to be simulated by the programmer. One of the old time favourites was snake and I think that Nokia has ressurected that one so a Java game of snake might have all the elements you need ie. graphics, can play one player, wouldn't be too big, would be a good task to get them writing loops and incrementing decrementing variables for snake size etc.
Other things your might try are visualisation of objects in 3D. I also had some sucess (ie. high level of enthusiasm) getting some 11 - 12 year olds to write fragments of code to display polyhedra. The 3d illusion really got them.
I think though that you needed to get kids onto some graphics say two or three years ago because that was the big thing. Now I think you're really going to need to address network connectivity and multiplay so here's another idea. Dad could write a little tcp server with a simple text protocol that relayed messages to clients that were connected and stick it on the web. Kids could write clients that talked to each other by connecting to the server. Once they had a session going they could flee the mother ship and continue on their own or continue to route via a forked process on the server (you choose). The advantage here is that a) Dad gets to do something for them codewise that they can actually use b) they can write applets as simple as two (or more) person chats through to graphically based multiplayer games. Once they exhaust the limits of the awt in Java there's the 2d stuff and then the 3d stuff. Also down the track if Dad's server is in C then the kids can get the source and try and overflow the buffer and smash the stack just for fun.
If they get tired of Java get them onto C, C++ with openGL which will get them producing 3D in no time.
Well there are just a few random thoughts that were floating around in my skull. Hope your kids have fun ! I look forward to the day when my daughter can get into some of this stuff.