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Daughter Moving on from Scratch…what’s next (self.programming)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Rhs519 to c/[email protected]

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Hello Everyone,

I’ve got a 10 year old daughter who loves making games in scratch, but she’s starting to run into that boundary where it stops working for you, and starts working against you.

She wants to make an adventure game in the vein of a trimmed down “legend of Zelda: link to the past”

I’ve looked at snap and gamefroot as potential next steps. Would consider a “true” language like JavaScript or python, but I’m worried she would be daunted if the ramp is too steep (maybe with the correct libraries/frameworks?) The immediate feedback and low ramp scratch offers are still important.

Anyone have any wisdom to share? Or point me to something I’ve missed?

Thanks

—- Update:

After some good discussion with my daughter, we’re going to try gamefroot (a proprietary, enhanced scratch) first.

She really wants to check out Gadot too.

Thanks everyone for the thoughtful comments and the help.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not exactly an answer to your question, but I, like her, started with scratch, and then found amazing App Inventor. It's a scratch-like approach to android apps, with tiny colorful blocks to make code and lot of potential.

"True" programming languages like the ones you mentioned at the beginning may be """boring""", because the first programs would be faceless terminal applications to process some inputted data. If she's really into games, a possible approach may be an interactive fiction, that is 100℅ terminal based, but super easy to do (no GUI to worry about that limits her creativity) while at the same time making her friendly with the code. Python can be my recommendation if this is your chosen path (I wrote my first IF in c++ without knowing about the existence of while and for loops, I used 100% the goto statements... It makes me shiver at the only thought of it...) If she then familiarize with the code and wishes to go on the game path, the pygame library can be very helpful

For 3D games there's unity3D, but it's a bit out of her ability right now, even if it's not too complicated

[–] Rhs519 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks so much for the thoughtful reply. I’ll have a chat with her about an IF project.