Teach Your Kids Basic Programming With Super Scratch Programming Adventure

If you think you might have a future programmer on your hands, it’s time to introduce your kid to Scratch. It’s a programming language that teaches the concepts of programming to young kids while making it easy for them to create animations, games, and more, then share them all with friends online. A new book from No Starch Press, Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games makes it even easier to get started.

Scratch was created at MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group. It’s targeted at ages eight and up, although my six-year-old finds it to be a lot of fun. If your child can read, understand numbers, and control a mouse, he can probably get started with Scratch, particularly if he’s used creative software like drawing programs. Younger children just may need a little more help than the older ones. To create programs in Scratch, you simply drag and drop colored puzzle-piece blocks of code written in simple language, snap them together, then change the variables:

Super Scratch Programming Adventure! helps your budding developer learn to use Scratch with a comic book story. Each section begins with a continuing piece of a story that ends by giving the reader a problem to solve with Scratch. Along the way, kids learn about software-building terms like “sprite,” “loop,” and “variable.” At the end of the book, they are rewarded with the fruits of their own creation, a game they can play knowing they made it themselves.

The best part about using Scratch is the wide range of skills that are involved, from the left-brain creativity to the right-brain reasoning. It also encourages sharing, collaborating, and learning from others–all additional non-programming skills useful in the programmer’s world.

Super Scratch Programming Adventure! was written by the LEAD Project (Learning through Engineering, Art and Design), which began in 2005 as a collaboration among The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, the MIT Media Lab, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Wordpress used to create game publishing platform

You would be forgiven for thinking Wordpress was just a tool for bloggers. For many this is as far as their use of the open source platform would go, but Dan Milward has taken the highly popular CMS and built a gaming system on top of it.

Milward is the founder of Wellington-based Instinct Entertainment, best known for creating the popular WP e-Commerce plugin, which has had more than 1.7 million downloads.

Tomorrow Milward’s team at Instinct are launching their latest creation called Gamefroot, an HTML5 game creator built using Wordpress’ database management system.

Milward demoed Gamefroot at Wordcamp NZ on Saturday for a crowd of Wordpress users and developers. The platform lets users create 8-bit style games using predefined sprite sheets, or by uploading their own graphics. You can give objects qualities like health or damage, add animations, and even add background music by uploading your own or choosing from music composed by Instinct.

The game’s information is stored as custom posts in the database, which when looked at from the back end would be very familiar to Wordpress users.

The Gamefroot project has been more than five years in the making, and is based on a previous product from Instinct called Game Creator.

Game Creator used Flash Lite to create platform games using pre-constructed tiles and sprites. Milward says within a few days of launching Game Creator users had created 350 Flash Lite games, more Flash Lite games than there were all together previously.

“This really proved to us the concept could work,” says Milward.

Since then Instinct has received funding from a Japanese investor to develop Gamefroot. Although initially reluctant to talk about opportunities to monetize the platform, Milward says if games are popular enough Instinct will team with the creator to take the game data and publish it for the Apple App Store, splitting any revenue made.