101–110 of 264 posts
I wrote quite a lot about my motivations a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41619733
I took the freedom to email you an api key to give it a try.
Good luck.
Unity sounds like the best fit to me - some code but a lot of interface. Code Club has a series of Unity projects which form a good getting started series: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/collections/unity As a Python programmer myself I found it fine helping my other son with those.
My 11 year old makes lots of stuff on Scratch by himself and has lots of fun. Scratch has pretty much become the default coding platforms for that under-12 age group. There are lots of resources and it's very easy to get making games, but it's limited in various ways and I have reservations about how great an introduction it is to programming beyond the real basics like variables and loops. If your child was seven or eight I would recommend Scratch, but feel like an 11 year old would probably be better off starting with something else.
Python is another option because you can help there and PyGame is the obvious library to use. It's quite a bit of work for somebody new to Python to make anything that feels like a game, although not impossible (I've been making a flag guessing game with my 11 year old in Python but using Tkinter instead) so more delayed gratification is definitely needed. You'd probably have to help a lot and there are a lot of concepts to learn - just becoming confident in how things like lists, dictionaries and objects work takes some time at that age. There are some books that lead you through making games with Python and PyGame though - Mission Python and Python Hunting spring to mind, with the caveat that I haven't worked through all of either of them. I think most 11 year olds would struggle to work through those books by themselves though, but if you skim through them and use them as a road map for making a game together, then they could be worth a go.
[random parental advice from the internet] Pick an adult solution and sit with them to provide adult guidance. You are at the stage where your relationship with your child becomes peer to peer. If game programming stays their jam, you will be learning game programming from them in the blink of an eye. It's joyous and wonderful and only gets better. Sure you will miss them being a small child, but you will know an ama…
At this age, I think it is more important to keep them motivated and find ways to use their creativity than to get them through the pains of debugging and learning too many technical concepts, even simple details like learning about image formats, how to reference them, case-sensitiveness are just obstacles against meeting their goals.
Roblox studio. My son is a sound designer for some of the top games there. He's also learning programming in Lua for Roblox platform. It is a small community of mostly kids aged 15-25 as far as I can tell. It doesn't seem like any professional adult game developers are part of the community (I got an inside view when I took my son to RDC this year). The top game developers are making millions of dollars per year (the…
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-roblox-pedophile-pro...
QB64 is a pretty good modern version thereof.
If any of their favorite games let you mod or script maybe check that out.
Nothing cooler than connecting the dots that I could affect how the game I loved behaved.
There are many problems that just are not suited to a young person at that age level of comprehension. Gaming graphics for example often requires understanding quaternion math, computer science, and hardware at a very low level (realtime processing where ms framerate processing counts).
Game design often also is multidisciplinary and requires knowledge of psychology, storytelling, music, and art.
Kids simply don't have the life experience, to put something together for this and have it turn out in a satisfying completed project.
Additionally, even when you are an expert, the experts don't play their own games most times. The vast majority of the fun and allure comes from the discovery of not knowing everything about the game and discovering it. This is why writing games for yourself is often doomed to failure.
Additionally, most games today have subtle manipulations and embedded addiction triggers. These aren't things they can just pick up and use. As an example of this, Call of Duty and Battlefield (FPS), have headshot audio triggers that associate through pavlovian conditioning headshots ingame with the dopamine hit sound cha-ching.
The ability to control addiction is in a part of the brain that doesn't usually develop fully until your 20s, and this stuff is in most modern games. There is a framework called the Octalysis Framework, it provides common methods to embed dark patterns in a way people don't perceive. It is based on some earlier work based in thought reform (torture), and later psychology experiments identifying key drivers to enable manipulation. This is extremely subtle stuff similar to what Pixar & Disney do in their movies (i.e. the handsome guy is always the villain, the preacher is always crazy...lot more).
Robert Cialdini wrote a book covering some of this precursor material. The book is called Influence, and it lays out all our natural perceptual blindspots, and how to exploit them. These are blindspots not even grown adults will notice most of the time without training.
I think you will be better served by starting them on something educationally constructive that is more suited for their age. If you are looking for something math related, Cosmic Calculator series has shortcuts that let you do math amazingly fast. Storytelling for writing authors may be good as well, or just focus on getting them to read for pleasure.
Descartes Rules of Method were particularly useful around that age as well as logic and reasoning (which public education will not teach them), since they are only just starting to be able to discern lies from truths, and that is a major developmental milestone.
Other activities might include Piano lessons, or art lessons.
The current gaming landscape is unhealthy, and can't be vetted by an 11-yo and even platforms designed to make this no-code easier, you have to worry about them suggesting and influencing in ways that will diminish them, or mislead, or creating interference and frustration, or something more directly harmful like TikTok and their recommendations to the Blackout Challenge (kids have literally died).
Some who don't have children might think this is overblown but there are no trusted platforms out there that will safeguard kids appropriately.
Google "Roblox kids scandal" and you'll see what I mean; and they've been recommended here in more than a few other comments.
Update: Sometimes I find it really surprising where others priorities are here on HN. You'd think protecting children would be paramount, but voting paints a very different picture, -3 for mentioning tiktok or the roblox scandal...
This is a surprisingly crowded space. Aside from the big names like Scratch, Blockly, Roblox and (to an extent) Minecraft Education. There are heaps of projects out there created by educators who wanted to improve their own course. One particular example I was quite impressed with was Blockly -> Unity: https://app.code-it-studio.de/course/step/4/44 I've worked in this space a lot: professional game development, led E…