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+1 My kids and I had a lot of fun with Pico-8, building simple games and learning basic geometry.

The community (inherited from Pico-8) is already implementing cat/wget/grep[1] and, of course, Minesweeper[2] in Picotron! Whatever Joseph White/zep is building brings back the early days of Internet and IRC where the everybody builds and shares unashamedly while having a ton of fun!

Thank you zep for making computing fun again for more mere mortals!

[1]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=140771 [2]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=140678

discuss

rahimnathwani|1 year ago

I'm curious how old your kids were when they started hacking on PICO-8 code?

My son (7yo) likes block-based programming (using Scratch, Scratch Jr and Octostudio) and Minecraft, but I'm wondering what a smooth on-ramp might be for PICO-8 or similar.

I got my first computer when I was about 10yo, so I was content to read through the books that came with it to learn the basics of BASIC and a little 6502 assembly. But I don't think that will work due to age, availability of other devices etc.

krumpet|1 year ago

My kids are 12 and 14 and I can't get them interested in coding beyond what they might do at school. They showed an interest in Scratch, but I believe I introduced it WAY too early. Moreover, it moved them too quickly past the creative aspects and into writing code. Also, years later, I showed them PICO-8 and they weren't terribly interested.

In hindsight, I would recommend working with them at a young age (<10) to design game art and ideas. Then, the parent implements it and ports it to a portable platform. The child sees the creative aspects and the final output, but is shielded from the coding side in the early days. I imagine a child playing a game they designed on paper with crayons would be really satisfying. It would almost be like magic!

Then, let the transition to the coding side happen more organically or through a school program or some such. Maybe when they finally ask, "So, parent, how do I actually code these games?"

Just my non-data backed opinion...