How To Teach Programming To Kids, Via XBox

An anonymous reader writes "Chris Wilson reviews Kodu, the new XBox game that he calls 'Logo on Steroids.' The game allows you to build a world and program every object in it with an in-house graphical language, making the game a primitive example of 'reactive state machines' in a 'multi-agent concurrent system.' It sounds like what we call 'application specific integrated circuits' in engineering, where every line of code runs in parallel."

adults?

[sopssa]

This is actually quite interesting. First time I came across state machines was in Max Payne level editor, which was something fantastic for a creator-minded / "lets try out what this shit can do" person like me. Now I'm mainly a programmer / game developer, but I always love to mess around with things and create fun things quickly just to see what they can do.

Too bad its mainly made for kids, there's not enough such toys for us adults :) However just out of the interest I guess I'll be getting this anyways (yeah, obviously for my kids that will born in ~5 years)

It's not directed enough

[Anonymous Coward]

In Logo one could draw 2d pictures. One would have to think out how to move the turtle to draw the picture that one wanted to draw. There was the setpos command to make things easy but more interesting was using the move/turn commands.

But Kodu doesn't seem to have any direction. What games are kids supposed to create? It's a tool without a purpose.

programming without typing?

[davek]

My first program was in 1991 on a TI-something:

print hello

this came with a syntax error. My second program was

print "hello"

And it worked. Over a decade later, I'm still programming. I'm not really convinced that "game" based programming systems do anything to inspire the young programmer. I say put them in front of a blinking cursor, the apt ones will just get it.

Re:programming without typing?

[ug333]

Personally, this attitude drives me nuts. Sure, the kids with a real natural love for it will pick it up no matter what interface you put in front of them. But you will hook MORE if you provide them something entertaining to get them interested. There are two major bars to clear: one to initially get interested in the profession and the second is to become a professional. I want the first bar low and the second bar high. There is plenty of time in the middle to filter out those people who lack the necessary skills. Trying to filter them up front is going to filter out some potentially good developers.

Re:Isn't this just a level editor?

[JimboFBX]

I think what he means is that is it more like the warcraft 3 level editor than programming, in which case I think the answer is "yes", although in reality it sounds like it is more like a 3d Klik and Play. For example, I don't forsee the ability to write to a file and read from a file or create complicated data structures as being features.

Not available in my country

[KDR_11k]

I really want Kodu just for some prototyping and maybe messing around (5€ is a nice price for that IMO) but it's only available in countries which have the community games available which doesn't include Germany (presumably because of the enforced age ratings that no community games will have so they'd effectively be 18+). I wish MS hadn't thrown it on the community games system and instead gone for plain XBLA.