Why Johnny can’t code

[drew]

All,

Here's another fun learning tool, this time from Microsoft. It's called Kodu. My kids love it and are already writing games with it.

Here's a video of my nine year old son Josh giving a demo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdhpwFpG ... e=youtu.be

Cheers,

Drew.

[ozhank]

I've given my grandkids a couple of older laptops, and introduced them to tcl/tk so that they can get straight into a window environment very quickly. I learnt my programming using BASIC on an Osborne with twin floppies and a little screen in the middle. Moved onto asm then C, COBOL and some Pascal, but prefered C. Did a few special apps in TCL/TK so they could work on PC, MACS and Linux boxes with no recompilation or recoding at all. Now working on a private project in C++ using Qt4 for my own interest.

One grandson is interested in what I am doing, hence the reason for giving laptop and loan of my tcl/tk books and references. He is doing fine, and hopefully going to do some ICT classes for his year 11 and 12.

[Switeck]

From what I've seen, over the last 5 years in particular, it's grown a LOT harder to even tinker with stuff on a computer.

I've been tinkering around with games since almost my first computer, a Commodore Vic-20 back around 1983.
Most games now tend to be monstrous in size and use encrypted/compressed datasets explicitly to protect against "hacking". I do have some sympathy for this, as these games are often multiplayer and overwhelmingly the most common tinkering done is for the sake of cheating. (That is, the real tinkering is done by a tiny number of people and used as cheats by many.)

Editing/changing datasets that a game or program uses is not programming in the strictest sense, but it can easily fall into the realm of pseudocode.