7 pointsby richardstahl6 hours ago9 comments
  • lackera minute ago
    I've been making games with JS in the browser with my kids, ages 7-13. Very simple games, the sort where we can just use emojis instead of real game assets. Even just building a game inside a Claude Artifact is pretty fun.

    The nice thing about JS is that there is not very much overhead in setting things up, debugging weird things, restarting.

  • sminchevan hour ago
    You have Claude Code. Use it ;) It will be really a good exercise for her to train how she express herself. To cleanly and correctly explain what she wants. And you can guide her, give her some tip and tricks. Once you have something really simple, you can try to show her some peaces of the code, just to show her how thinks looks like, without going in to details how it works and what it does. If she at some point get curious, she might come and ask herself, and this is where the magic and love of code will happen ;)

    I would propose a simple program with a few steps, it can be a console one, to draw a circle, to draw a rectangle, to draw a pink unicorn ;)

    Happy, for me, I don't have such problems. My girl wants to be football player.

  • codingdave6 hours ago
    I made games with my kids when they were that age.

    We did it with cardboard, poster board, markers, tape, etc, and built a real-life model/mock-up of the game first. Then we let them play it and only when they actually liked it did we code it.

    I found that while some kids want to learn to code, most kids don't care about the code and want to make a game. So if you jump straight to code, you actually make them lose interest. Make the coding a phase 2 once they already know the game is fun.

    • richardstahl5 hours ago
      Thank you, good advice. I am not yet sure of going the full monty of doing a complete real-life mock-up, but maybe rather focus on a conceptual understanding of how things should wire together.

      As a bonus I also think that if we create conceptual game assets in the pen and paper way first - say a 60 second drawing of her beloved unicorn - she can use some quiet time later to make it more elaborate.

    • falcor846 hours ago
      > most kids don't care about the code and want to make a game

      Funny how this is somewhat of an endorsement of vibe coding a prototype.

    • TacticalCoder5 hours ago
      I happen to have a 11 y/o daughter too. I teach her coding not because I want to make her a dev: but to me it's important that she gets, early on, the mindset.

      So "gamified coding" it is. Online platforms with simplified source code (but still actual code), making little animals move on the screen, by using code, to solve challenges. She already did more than 300 such challenges and understood loops and variables. She begins to understand how functions do work, side-effect, pure functions, etc.

      But the thing is: she's 11 y/o. I'm the boss. A nice boss, a gentle listening boss. But I'm the boss. I get to decide whether she can spend 16 hours per day in front of screens playing or not (she can't). I get to decide how many time she can play out in the street with the neighbour's kids (as I type this she's doing just that) and how many hours she does maths, code, etc.

      Then I apply concepts between maths on paper and code. For example she loves having one variable named "O_o" as a joke.

      This shows a great understanding of what a variable is (although a poor choice in naming it!).

      Then we do maths, on paper, and I literally generate her exercise on paper sheet with:

          O_o = 3 * x + 2 * y + 7
      
          Find me the value of O_o for the following values of x and y.
      
      She loves that: suddenly she sees, on paper, that same O_o variable she sometimes uses in the code as a joke. And she sees me doing the joke.

      She'll be a rebellious teenager soon enough that, as of now, I still get to decide ; )

      P.S: at 11 y/o she doesn't have a phone yet either. That shall come soon enough too.

      P.P.S: space repetition too. For maths for example... I see where she's struggling, then it's space repetition mode. I generate her custom exercises and three times a week it's hammering.

  • turtleyacht6 hours ago
    Scratch 1.x (1.4) is nice if you already have some books bought or borrowed. Very quick to get something running and everything is visual. (Avoid any games that need clone, or duplicate the functions.)

    Two approaches: either build as many games as you can, or create a couple physics-based games that can be dissected and modified for insight on mechanics.

    Penguin Jumper and Tower Smash highlight Scratch's ability to simulate game physics. They are from Code Your Own Games! Twenty Games to Create with Scratch (2016) by Max Wainewright.

    Likely not much can be done on a weekend versus months; regardless of the technology, have at least one "Wow, amazing" thing from community or Steam to show what's possible.

  • xeonmc3 minutes ago
    Love2d is the best
  • benoau6 hours ago
    I would go JS/HTML5 and just do something really basic like memory card game so the programming will be very simple for you and the path to a playable prototype is very short, maybe not even 100 lines of code, nothing to set up, nothing to google. Once it's playable you can focus on polishing how it looks which will probably be more fun.
  • ill_ion8 minutes ago
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  • atlasagentsuite6 hours ago
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  • stephenlf6 hours ago
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