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My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

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Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#131

Very impressive! Hopefully you'll excuse this question but do you foresee AI in the future also taking over the handholding & guidance that you as parents provided to your son? (In other words: Will kids soon learn exclusively from AI?)

The human component here is to understand what the child is trying to do, what the available options are, and what level of guidance he needs to steer him towards the option that makes sense (ie easy enough for a simple game for a child, just a small step from what he already knows, etc).

This all comes down to "judgement".

The current state-of-the-art isn't yet there yet (saying this as someone who spent the last year building on current LLM tech).

I think it's possible for AI to take on the role in the future, when it's capable of reasoning at a much higher level than it's at now. We already have big context windows, ability for AI to "see" your screen, etc. But what we're missing is good judgement.

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#132
post #129

Enemy scaling system does not make sense. A black hole should have incomprehensionable hp. It broke my immersion; which, was a shame because I was really happy with nailing 3 math problems in row. 2nd does the enemy need to do math?? What the heck! Other than keep up the good work.

Appreciate the feedback!

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#133

This is pretty impressive! I didn't expect math, so that was a nice surprise. Many others have pointed out some nice changes. I have a super nitpick - the enemy's HP immediately decrements before the "hit" animation plays out. There is properly delay before the Game Over screen, so that tells me the HP decrement could probably get the same treatment easily enough. Kudos to your son and props for fostering this creati…

Fixing the nitpick (hit timing) is on his plan.

Appreciate the feedback!

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"It looks like a scam" is arguably the most charitable feedback you'll get for launching a NFT-laden product in 2024.

It's not an NFT-laden product, and it wasn't launched in 2024.

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#135
post #26

Amazing. Younger people (and people new in any field) often think of intersting approaches without the blessing/curse of "best practices." The process for creating the game was very good and very logical way to learn a new field. I would recommend a couple of small things for the code. Variable names are usually ALL_CAPS if they never change (for instance const PI =3.142) and camelCaseForOtherVariables. snake_case_va…

Agree 100%. Since dad helped, I was expecting to see sprites sheets, or some JS classes for some OOP, etc. Was pleasantly surprised to see how "simple" the approach was for such fun output with a decent amount of variety.

This is how cool new ideas arrive each generation

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had a long journey. Main thing is that I realized that my son doesn't learn enough from open ended tools like Scratch. So we tried a bunch of other things. He started with Scratch JR & Scratch. Then we switched to Tynker Jr & Tynker. Which provide challenge oriented block based games. Teaches loops, functions, etc. Then we switched to CodeMonkey, which provides challenge oriented block & code based games (coffe…

I'm curious how much use he got out of Tynker? I noticed they have a cyber Monday sale right now, so I might sign up for a year.

Tynker has many games in the app. But they are basically the same type of game with different themes. Your kid will gravitate to whatever theme they like (princess, dragon, space, etc).

It would encourage him to reduce number of lines of code (i.e. use loops!) to get more stars. And we encouraged him to get 3 stars on every level.

It also provided both a block based view or a code based view of the work you're doing, which I thought was pretty cool.

Big thumbs up from my side for the app. It taught him the basics of loops and functions, through challenges to keep it motivation.

My kid loved the dragon theme.

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had a long journey. Main thing is that I realized that my son doesn't learn enough from open ended tools like Scratch. So we tried a bunch of other things. He started with Scratch JR & Scratch. Then we switched to Tynker Jr & Tynker. Which provide challenge oriented block based games. Teaches loops, functions, etc. Then we switched to CodeMonkey, which provides challenge oriented block & code based games (coffe…

I really have to applaud how astute you've been with your observations of how your son is learning things. That's quite difficult. Additionally, I'm glad you weren't afraid to hand your son the real tools and let him build and break stuff. For some reason with programming, so much of the curriculum (even for adults) spends a lot of effort to hide away the things that are perceived as too difficult (e.g., pointers, me…

As a programmer, I feel the 'fundamentals' are very important. Because, well, then there's no magic.

I think the curriculum hides the code because its just so complicated. For example, just to build on the web he has to learn 3 different languages (HTML, CSS, JS). To do anything simple (like move a box on a screeen) there are too many choices (animated gif, CSS animation, JS animation, etc). Then there's complexity of code management (eg: this game uses just 1 big file) or deployment (how do you "run" your code).

So I believe simplifying things (i.e. Scratch) is a way to get people to do it without getting scared of the complexity. In our case, the goal is to learn the complexity, just in baby steps.

Appreciate your comments!

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#140

> But there was one downside to AI. AI was like a human which is why you could talk to it like a human. But because it was like a human, it could also be wrong like a human. So I had to make sure that it wasn't getting the answer wrong. For which I would sometimes use Google Search. I really don't buy that this was written/created by an actual 9yr old. But this might just be my unhealthy pessimism/skepticism when it…

"Everyone dies one day. Everyone. Even wolves. But not books. Not words. Words don't die" -- My son, 3.

love it.
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