Madness In My Method

Okay, I actually disagree with calling it "Programming for Dummies," but it is definitely beginner's programming. That's not a bad thing, but instead a very, very good thing. The method used for Scratch appears to be taking hold in ways I was hoping it would.

Meet the game Human Resource Machine.



It was created by the same folks that made World of Goo and Little Inferno, which I adore. It combines their own cartoon style with the Scratch-based method of visual code blocks to create an interesting puzzle game.

Middle nephew (age 10) went out with me to the bookstore today. I wanted to entice him to get a game programming book. We sat for a while looking through the programming for kids selection, thumbing through various language books to get an idea of what kind of games each produced. He already had experience with Scratch via Code.org's Minecraft Hour of Code, and although the games looked prettier in the images in the Scratch book, we actually chose to settle on this Video Game Programming for Kids book, which has games similar in nature to the ones we saw in the Scratch book. I'm proud, because while I love that Scratch gets kids more involved in programming in a way a bunch of programming code on a screen really can't, he actually opted ON HIS OWN to go with the more difficult "real code" book.

I never had such pretty, colorful snap-on programming lines to work with while growing up, but the combination of my Compurobot and the program given in the Commodore 64 Instruction Manual to create a sprite making an image on the screen worked just as well at teaching me the basics of programming back in the 80's. I learned Pascal in high school in the early 90's, but never really took it very far.

I spent a little time explaining to him what I'm currently doing for work, that it involves using VBA and SQL with MS Access, and pointing out the various sections for each of those reference and training books in the bookstore. Later I actually showed him the database, showed how I could change button colors, wording, layout, and then how different input created different pop-up responses. Then I walked him through one of the easier VBA subs reading only my step-by-step comments and explaining that the code in between the comments depends on which language we use to do the programming. We discussed the various programming languages, and I'm glad he chose the book he did, because it utilizes QuickBasic. We took a gander at the kid's books for Java, Ruby, Python, Scratch, and generic "Coding", and I also pointed out to him in the adult side of the aisle other languages like R, C, C++, C#, and a few others that even I'm not all that familiar with.

We went to a coffee house and downloaded QB64 which promptly pissed me off by closing every time I hit Run to compile and run the code. I'm still not sure what on that laptop is creating the hindrance (I have Admin access and already test-disabled Avast and Ad-Aware while attempting to compile), but we did manage to get it to work on the desktop he has in his bedroom back home. Instead of the typical, "Hello, World," this book has, "Hello, Stinky Head!" I explained to him how that's become the unofficial First Program for anyone learning a programming language. After getting that to work and getting the option to output whatever he wanted, he entered, "Funky Monkey Baby," and then proceeded to keep singing that Super Bowl commercial jingle around the house for the next hour or so, even though it should be, "Puppy Monkey Baby," but who am I to correct his first self-made computer project?

We also spent time looking at MS Paint, zooming in to see the bit-level size of images, then zooming out to create colorful images. This then translated well into explaining how that image can be saved as a certain file type and then accessed by the game programming code. We then searched for "gray brick image files" and he could understand how a programmer could use those files to create building textures for a game. I opened up some Skyrim digital image files as well and he was getting the bigger picture of how things like buildings in a virtual world game are created.

He was so ecstatic about his Funky Monkey Baby.