[Tayacan]

I recently got a job teaching two kids (age 11 and 14) to develop games, which is... ya know, totally awesome! I'm starting them out in Scratch to teach them some basics (variables, 2D coordinates, control structures) without all the typing, especially for the sake of the youngest one.

I'm planning to teach them several languages/engines/libraries along the way, both to have some sort of progression in both complexity and flexibility, and to make them focus more on concepts than on syntax. So far I have Scratch, Processing, Pygame and Unity3D as potential candidates.

Scratch execute code "line by line", you can make as many "parallel" blocks as you want, and it's all on a per sprite basis. Processing and Unity both have a function that runs in a loop (draw() in Processing, Update() in Unity), but in Pygame you have to make a main loop on your own. Is there a third way?

I don't really need help (I've got at least two months worth of material for them so far, and that took me maybe 30 minutes), I'd just like to hear some ideas. Crazy or otherwise.

Thanks

[modi123_1]

Take a look at:

https://research.mic.../projects/kodu/

http://www.alice.org/

[Tayacan]

Thanks! I'd heard of Alice before, but hadn't thought of using it - I'll have to try it to see how it compares with Scratch.

I'd never heard of Kodu before - it looks really nice and polished, but I actually think these kids are beyond that level already. Maybe I can use it if I have to teach some even younger kids (or less brilliant eleven-year-olds).

[nickolai51]

Having taught some programming at school, I find Processing to be incredibly quick for people to get into and the fact that all classes are inner classes helps speed up development and simplify things for them even if the code isn't too neat at the end.. Also, it's Java with a few libraries, so any language points they learn from using it can be applied elsewhere.