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Is there a good alternative to flash for teaching game development to beginners?

Asked 2010-10-28T21:12:25.943
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I have been asked to research teaching a module in game development to beginners (no programming skills) of the age group 18-30, at a secondary school level. The course will run for roughly 8-10 months and each student would probably get 3 hours of teaching time per week.

My initial thoughts were to propose using Flash, since the student could make a simple but functioning game with little knowledge of programming. The budget is tight though, and I thought it wise to look into some alternatives in case the budget doesn't stretch far enough.

I know there are FOSS flash builder applications out there such as AJAX Animator but having never used them I am worried that they won't be able to deal with variables and such, even at a simple level, to handle scores, lives etc.

Does anyone have any thoughts on some good alternatives or different approaches? Students must develop some kind of playable game by the end of the course.

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3 Answers

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I'm a primary (elementary / middle school) school teacher - so the things we've done are pretty basic, but here's what we've played with:

  • Alice (as per @orbit) - I found it a bit cumbersome for our kids, but it's certainly got potential. (Free!)
  • Kodu for looking at game logic and focusing on playability and processes (not programming / variable stuff, but certainly logic). (Free - at least for us on the beta - you've got to buy an xbox controller tho).
  • Game Salad looks like it has a lot potential too, but I've only had a brief look. (Free).
  • Scratch is a pretty neat starter for variables / logic. I've used it with 8 year olds up to 13 year olds. (Free!)

Sounds like a fun course to teach! I hope it goes well. I'd probably have a good look at GameSalad for that age group - particularly since the iPod Touch / iPhone is pretty trendy / exciting at the moment.

answered 2010-10-28T21:24:55.700
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You could look into alice, http://www.alice.org/

answered 2010-10-28T21:16:33.037
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I'm using gamemaker in a computer programming club for kids. I've got kids from 3rd grade to 9th grade attending.

What is nice about gamemaker is that there are enough built in pre-programmed modules/events etc to be able to build simple games without any programming at all. There is a graphical interface and logic can be built using graphically represented pieces. There is certainly logic and process that has to be learned but mostly you need just basic computer skills to start.

I'm doing this with kids in Czech Republic who only have a rudimentary knowledge of english which makes it a bit tougher but they are getting it and learning some english to boot.

For the older kids that are interested there is the opportunity within this development environment to also do coding as there is a fairly rich coding environment available to those that want to create much more complex games. There are also lots of dlls available created by users and there is a basic 3d framework as well although it is limited.

I'm not a programmer by trade .. just a hobbyist ... just to put this in perspective.

There is a free lite version of gamemaker which will allow you to do a lot including creation of .exe files to play the games on most windows machines. There are advanced features that are not available in the lite version ... it's described pretty well on their website.

answered 2011-11-09T08:29:51.153

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