When I was kid, I played a lot of video games, and was always curious on how they worked. Eventually, I started making my own video games in QBasic. Later, I learned C++ so that I could make more advanced games. I loved it so much, and over the years, I became hungry to learn more about mathematics, programming, and physics within the context of the games I was making.
I believe that game development can be a fun way to get kids interested in science and technology. And today, there seem to be a lot of options available for kids. But what are the best ways to get young kids involved in it all? Are there any good frameworks, schools, resources, etc that are appropriate for kids interested in exploring and experimenting with game development?
Pick a platform and build a game. The absolute best site to get started talking to other developers and working on projects is gameful.org.
You may want to take a look at the following platforms:
Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/)
AgentSheet (http://www.agentsheets.com/)
Kudo (http://fuse.microsoft.com/projects/kodu)
App Inventor (https://code.google.com/p/app-inventor-for-android/)
I performed few workshops for kids aged 10-15 with GameMaker. Within one hour when properly guided they are able to create one room game, simple but working, and meantime learn concepts like sprite, object, collision, event, action, etc...
I also met some of them that were continuing work at home, with quite interesting results.
You will find more at: http://yoyogames.com/education
I do not know Scratch, but in last wourkshops group I had some kids talking they were learning it. And still they were amazed by results coming from GameMaker.
In the New Media program at SUNY Purchase, we have a course titled "Programming Games". It fulfills a math-based general education requirement and is therefore very popular. It's at the discretion of the instructor what programming environment is used. Instructors have tried a variety of approaches from Flash to HTML5 but it appears to me that one of the most successful is Processing (http://www.processing.org). It's a very comfortable IDE that uses a programming syntax that is simplified yet not so removed from real-world programming. The lessons learned translate well to other languages and it's easy to introduce more and more advanced programming concepts.
Game Maker is an excellent introduction to the full spectrum of game development. if you are interested in getting girls into coding, Alice 2 is a great tool for that. There are also some useful practical/non technical pieces of kit for simple theoretical game idea creation activities in class, such as the PlayGen Gamification card deck. http://gamification.playgen.com/
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