Hah. BlitzBasic? I guess I must be strange for simply enjoying BASIC syntax and seeing it as a language for general use. I use FreeBASIC at the moment for my BASIC coding. I was in fact, programming a game in BASIC and was getting prototypes done fairly quickly until I ran into problems due to lack of inheritance and the likes.

Anyways, your post made me realize that BASIC syntax isn’t enough. Even though I’m comfortable in FreeBASIC, and it’s what got me into coding other languages, to really appeal to beginners, the community should probably consider putting together a Beginner’s Suite of some sort.

Of course, now with pre-existing frameworks becoming so popular, I might as well just recommend them Java instead. Netbeans is a great IDE. Java’s framework is excellent. The naming conventions are great for beginners. The official sun tutorials are wonderful, too… Hrm.

Hmmmm… The role of “writer” doesn’t seem to be on Raph’s list of job types that go into games. Maybe we’d have fewer games that involved the main character suffering from amnesia if a few more professional writers were brought in at the design stage.

Raph, I would welcome a good very graphic presentation that provides information to children regarding the questions posed by your 12 year old.

I can assure you it would be very welcomed by kids and teachers alike.

If you had his job, did what he does, what priority would you assign to an inquiry from a student you don’t know who needs help with a homework assignment?

I’d take a break.

OTOH, I’m not complaining that he didn’t answer quickly. He answered when he was able or moved to. My answer is to deflect that characterization of police officer scheduling and comparing it to his work based on having them as customers for a decade and the fact that I am an executive in a software company. They have a much rougher job than Raph or I have or will ever have one hopes. The games they play aren’t fun.

And that is a fine counter example although I don’t read where this guy has to face down a husband beating a wife only to be shot in the back by the wife. Welcome to the most dreaded call: domestic violence.

From the description, the worst problem Van has is when he gets pulled over for a traffic stop, he stays afraid until the call clears. On the other side of that is a policeman afraid that if he says the wrong thing, he’ll be talking to internal affairs the next day. And so it goes, but that is why dash-cams are in most rolling stock these days.

Otherwise, we can agree here that anyone with a full time intense job has long hours and needs a break.

I took a summer school class on BASIC when I was about that age. They taught us simple things like variables, if-then constructs, for loops, and how to print text to the screen. From there I was hooked. My Dad bought me a PC and I started making simple text adventure games, as well as many failed attempts to implement the entire D&D ruleset.

I would say any simple scripting language where they don’t have to compile and where they can easily produce some visual output would be great for a 12 year old. What fascinated me was just being able to read input from the user and respond with different output based on the input. Such simple concepts that open up a universe of possibilities.

Kids need flashy graphics and instant results to keep them interested. I’d suggest an authoring environment. The best and simplest authoring tool I ever used was mTropolis. That one died a horribly premature death.

Maybe I’m not giving 12-year-olds enough credit, but if the child hasn’t really touched a programming language before, authoring tools offer the same programming thought processes without concern for the real technical side of memory and asset management. Director is great in that respect. Perhaps even Wintermute would be a good start?

Sounds good, Morgan. You have an n of one. You flunk stats 101. I realize you are a relationship manager and are paid to blow up skirts whenever possible, but you don’t really know much about this.

I spent the last ten years working on police records management systems where all of my customers were police. It isn’t a citizenship nice-to-be. It is a requirement of the job and is considered ‘duty’. They don’t get paid for those hours and that is a big difference between them and an executive. I’m sure requirements vary among agencies, but I don’t think you will find a sworn officer who thinks he has enough time in the day for filling out reports much less answering mail. They hand those off to the PIO (Public Information Officer) typically. When they don’t, they are assigned to a liaison position for community relations and the time is scheduled. Some squeeze in private responses but they take the time to do that from their family or hobbies, which is pretty much what Raph has to do I suspect.

On the other hand, the chief executive of my last employer lived in another state and came to the main operations about once a week on average. He worked hard when he was there; he played hard when he wasn’t. Another n of one, so I doubt that is a general example.

I’ve never seen a CEO put his life on the line every day for an entire career only to retire with a medium house, medical bills for injuries, and a retirement salary that doesn’t keep up with inflation. I don’t really feel a lot of pity for the time they have to take to answer a kid’s letter.

It isn’t the time in; it’s the mileage and the terrain that matter.

I’ll be the odd man out and suggest Visual Basic for newcomers to programming, particularly youths. It’s very graphical, drag and drop, and you can get immediate results in just a few minutes. It’s also easy to outgrow it. Then JavaScript might be a good second language to get them thinking more in object oriented terms.

I second the above suggestion about RunUO. Working with it over the last year has grown my skills exponentially. To really learn how to make games of the caliber I want to make, “Hello World” just doesn’t cut it for a good example of code. Multiplayer game platforms have a lot of complex and counterintuitive concepts that I had to be shown, via a framework and ruleset with which I was already familiar. I wish there were more things like it. It’s what I use to sharpen my skills until I can have Metaplace.

The legal ramifications make me sad; because of that risk, I can’t share what I make with people. It’s only on my local box as a tool of study.

HA! I forgot to mention that it is called Alice.
http://www.alice.org

I have a suggestion but it will probably seem weird: Excel’s VBA. Almost everyone has a version or another of Office installed at home and it is a surprisingly useful tool. Finding information on google is easy, the macro editor is adequate and the macro recorder can be used to generate pieces of code and then reverse engineer it.

Granted, you won’t make a pretty game out of it but you can do fairly complex stuff such as a two dimension table top game with it. Using it will enable someone to familiarize himself with the basic building blocks (if/else, switch, operations, functions, etc) which you will find in every other languages. It is also relatively less intimidating than other languages and offers direct results on screen.

One last bonus: the experience gained from such coding can later be used in other fields if a gaming career does not work out. Even a very simple macro can sometime save days of work in an accounting department and it makes you look like a hero .

Start ‘em on Apple Logo

My first exposure to programming was BASIC thirty years ago, but Assembly was what really blew through the barriers for me. I mean, I don’t know how much practical use it still has in the game development industry, and I’m sure it’s use will disappear completely before long, but you’d be hard pressed to find a better primer on how to talk to a machine. Granted, might be a bit much for a 12-year-old, but my 14-year-old seems to be understanding the fundamentals pretty well.

Who knows? Maybe when this 12-year-old is hitting the “real world” coding will be drag n’ drop. Let’s face it, most people (of any age) who speak of programming games are really wanting to design them anyway, so he’s probably better off cutting his teeth on mod tools and scripting languages.

In my completely inexpert opinion.

I have to say, kinda disappointed it took you a month to respond to him (rant follows). How many projects back in school do you know had a due date of more than a month out at that point? I’m somewhat miffed mainly because I had to do this exact same thing over a decade ago and I couldn’t get a single game developer to write back in a timely manner. I sent out five or six letters and the EARLIEST reply was THREE MONTHS. Somehow people who interviewed firefighters and police got their replies almost immediately or within a week with a meeting set up. Tell me, exactly how are you more busy than a police officer or firefighter? The least you could have done was tell the kid “Sorry I don’t have time”.

Anyway, I think a lot of your answers were too technical for some in 7th grade, although you don’t have any reference points to go off. Back in 5th or 6th I was getting into QBASIC and by 8th I was reading books on programming so it could differ widely. However, when you start talking about IDEs I’m pretty sure you lost him and any other non-technical person reading his paper. Overall, it looks like you started out good, but got more and more technical as you went on. BlitzBasic was a good suggestion though.

If this sounds a little rough to you, it probably is, but I’m simply speaking from experience as someone who had to do this assignment many years ago and was disappointed with the large lack of response. As a suggestion, if you’re feeling up to it, a “show-and-tell” type feature (where you went out to his school) might make up for the lack of contact IMHO. If you’re not too busy :p

VRML is easy to learn and uses Javascript. We had good luck with kids building with that language. Also, there are a lot of free tools, editors, browsers, models, tutorials, etc. It really helps the learning process to have a language that is amenable to View Source so a beginner can look at things they like and imitate and improve them.

And of course, it is Internet-ready so easily shared.

I’ll put in another vote for Javascript as a good first language (for anyone new to programming, not just 12 year olds). Reasons: First, there’s nothing to install; all you need is a web browser and a text editor. It’s easy to forget how big an obstacle installation alone can be to a new user.

Second, you can do graphics straight away (for values of “graphics” equal to “animated web pages”, which is a pretty good value these days). You don’t have to spend a lot of time at the command line first, another turn-off to new users.

Third, there’s a lot of depth in there. Javascript programs start off very simple (and the availability of “onClick” and similar hooks means that you don’t even need to start with a complete program, just a one-liner), but when you explore further, you can find a lot of advanced stuff that isn’t in most languages, such as functional programming. You can learn a lot more about computer science from Javascript alone than you can from almost any other language.

(When I first started teaching myself Javascript, I had a fully working game of Minesweeper before the end of the first day.)

BTW, if you had to recommend a programming language to today’s 12-year-olds, what would it be?

It was C64 Basic for me but I think today JavaScript or anthing that comes from ECMA-262 (ECMAScript) would be a safe choice. This covers Flash (ActionScript), Director (JavaScript was added in the last version), Unity (looked pretty cool at GDC), the browser and lots of other stuff that should be relatively accessable to a teen and allow him to change his mind a few times about what to dive into.