TheCPUWizard
October 5th, 2008, 09:17 PM
I am thinking of reproducing a project I did about 20 years ago. A simple environment where young people [8-12 years of age] can be introduced to the general concepts of computer programming.
The original project was designed for the Commodore 64 (that gives an Idea of how old it was), the first machine to support "sprite" graphics.
It was a fairly straight forward project to have all of the subroutines already created. The students could modify the graphic for the sprites, "write" a few lines of (Basic) code,and bingo, there was a simple game that they could play.
I used this in a series of workshops that I did with various school districts. It was great.
Todays kids are MUCH more sophisticated, and what was an "exciting" game back then would now be totally uninteresting.
Fortunately software technology has also progressed.
What I am invisioning is a .NET set of libbraries and a framework along with some "designers" so kids could drag/drop certain parts, set a bunch of parameters, AND write some code (think dynamic compilation here). and have something that approaches todays games, but was unique to their creation.
At present this is a volunteer/community type effort. The two main areas that need initial assistance are the game concept and graphics (managed direct-x probably).
Depending on how progress goes, this will probably be hosted on SourceForge, CodeProjectl, or CodePlex. It will be OpenSource (exact licensing model TBD).
I am also posting this idea on a few other 'boards...
Anyone interested, please post here or send me a PM.
The original project was designed for the Commodore 64 (that gives an Idea of how old it was), the first machine to support "sprite" graphics.
It was a fairly straight forward project to have all of the subroutines already created. The students could modify the graphic for the sprites, "write" a few lines of (Basic) code,and bingo, there was a simple game that they could play.
I used this in a series of workshops that I did with various school districts. It was great.
Todays kids are MUCH more sophisticated, and what was an "exciting" game back then would now be totally uninteresting.
Fortunately software technology has also progressed.
What I am invisioning is a .NET set of libbraries and a framework along with some "designers" so kids could drag/drop certain parts, set a bunch of parameters, AND write some code (think dynamic compilation here). and have something that approaches todays games, but was unique to their creation.
At present this is a volunteer/community type effort. The two main areas that need initial assistance are the game concept and graphics (managed direct-x probably).
Depending on how progress goes, this will probably be hosted on SourceForge, CodeProjectl, or CodePlex. It will be OpenSource (exact licensing model TBD).
I am also posting this idea on a few other 'boards...
Anyone interested, please post here or send me a PM.