lalow

My 10 year old son has been talking alot about wanting to program his own games. I know very little about programmimg so dont know where to start to help him. I found a few free resources when i did a google search, like Alice but not really sure about what they are. Any ideas to help me help him find resources. He has asked about classes he might take but I havnt found any. He would like to write mods for minecraft but create his own game too. I know mincraft is written in Java, is there a language he could learn first that would be a good introduction prior to tackling something like that. Any ideas? Thanks

BRIAN POLIKOWSKY

Alice is free and easy.
If you Google learning javascript  there are several good links including one for beginners.
If he wants to learn to make mods for Minecraft than Java is the way to go.
Lots of great videos on Youtube too.
Lots of free tutorials online.

 Maybe start there. Find a free tutorial and try it out. FInd some Youtube videos and watch.
 He will see if he likes.

If you Google how to make video games there are several sites where you can make easy games and 
several videos on Youtube also!
I would check them out and do some more research on those and watch some videos!


 
Alex Polikowsky

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Karen

>>>>>Any ideas?<<<<<

Scratch is a great visual programming language that is free from MIT:

http://scratch.mit.edu/

It is a great introduction to scripts in a visual format.

Kodu is a Microsoft visual programming language that is also free and great for beginners:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/

My son is nine and has used and enjoyed both. He is now moving on to learning Python, and is using "Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners" by Warren D. Sande and Carter Sande. We purchased our copy from here:

http://www.manning.com/sande/

It is very accessible and written by a father-son team with kids as the audience in focus.

In all of the above our son was able to explore on his own, although I found them lots of fun to explore too! Ethan has made some great games, especially with the visual programming software.

Karen.

Denaire

--- In [email protected], "lalow" <lalougor@...> wrote:
>
> My 10 year old son has been talking alot about wanting to program his own games. I know very little about programmimg so dont know where to start to help him. I found a few free resources when i did a google search, like Alice but not really sure about what they are. Any ideas to help me help him find resources. He has asked about classes he might take but I havnt found any. He would like to write mods for minecraft but create his own game too. I know mincraft is written in Java, is there a language he could learn first that would be a good introduction prior to tackling something like that. Any ideas? Thanks
>

Hi my son Elliott wants to make video games and we bought Game Maker 8, we paid for the full version. He is also going to an ID TECH camp this summer, they have campuses all around the country. I have added a link below for both along with other gaming ideas. Hope these help. Happy gaming.
Denaire

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/five-free-game-development-tools-make-your-own-games/

http://www.yoyogames.com/make

http://www.internaldrive.com/

Kimberly Pennington

Stanford also has free online classes. He won't earn credit for them, but
it is the same information taught in the undergraduate courses at Stanford.
They have a three-course introduction to computer science, and several
advanced courses.

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

Also, once he begins to learn a programming language, a fun website to
exercise his skills is www.projecteuler.net. It is a series of mathematical
problems--too difficult to be efficiently solved by calculator--that you
write programming code to solve, using any language you wish.

Another practice site, exclusively for Java, is
codingbat.com<http://www.codingbat.com>.
If he is interested in web programming, the site I often use for reference
is w3schools.com <http://www.w3schools.com>; it has a lot of tutorials for
many different types of web programming.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Jen

Wanted to share that my daughter Pearl went to ID TECH camp last summer and really enjoyed it. In general she isn't much into group activities, but she liked this.

Jennie


>>>>He is also going to an ID TECH camp this summer, they have campuses all around the country. I have added a link below for both along with other gaming ideas. Hope these help. Happy gaming.
> Denaire
>
> http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/five-free-game-development-tools-make-your-own-games/
>
> http://www.yoyogames.com/make
>
> http://www.internaldrive.com/
>

[email protected]

Alex, thank you and others for pointing me in the right direction. I also have a son who would like to learn to make his own mods/texture packs in Minecraft.

Leslie