I have a niece who wants to make a video game. I have 0 experience teaching and am very likely to recommend her some crazy complicated shit that will turn her off to the idea. She’s 8. Anyone have experience with this? Her first instinct was to try and make games in the Roblox engine but I know exactly how exploitative that shit is and how nontransferable those skills are
Libre software is a must
This is very well thought out and I appreciate it. In terms of making art and being creative, I 100% want to spare her as long as possible from the urge to monetize it. She’s essentially been gambling since she was a toddler. The combinations of “surprise” toys and collectibles all rolled into toy franchises with cartoons, complete with animated cartoons and entire Youtube channels dedicated to unboxing them and talking about how fun it was to buy them, this shit has gotten really aggressive. But in terms of stuff that she makes on her own, I will discourage her from commodifying that work for as long as possible
For an 8 year old, definitely Scratch.
For slightly older kids or anyone who’s taken geometry I’ll throw Racket (a Scheme dialect) out there — it’s a functional language built specifically for learning, the course How To Design Programs uses it and is pretty accessible and specifically has libraries that are used for drawing, coloring, and animating images in a very beginner friendly, digestible way
Look for Scratch solutions. Once they’ve got a handle on this there’s a number of toys and things that use it. Lego mindstorms, star wars force sensor toys, crap like that.
Scratch! Very simple and easy to learn, perfect for teaching kids the basics of programming. Then you can go into the more advanced stuff
