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> He just lost motivation. I guess command line output only motivates a kid so much these days. That's why we made text based games and an tkinter based RPG ga

> He just lost motivation. I guess command line output only motivates a kid so much these days. That's why we made text based games and an tkinter based RPG game at a coding bootcamp where I do mentoring.

hguant 10y ago
Honestly, the two things that kept me motivated to keep writing (actually writing, not just "oh hey this is cool") code when I was learning were games and my girlfriend. Games - We were learning how to play Pathfinder, so I wrote a little character creation thing in Python. Girlfriend - thought it was awesome when I wrote her letters that were interactive programs. Though I found out later she didn't want to go through multiple times to find everything I'd written, so she just skipped to reading the source.
tribby 10y ago
I'm glad to hear this is still happening! I learned C as a kid some 20 years ago writing a text-based RPG. It was just the right balance between "look everybody I made a game" and "wow there's a lot more to learn," which is a pretty ideal outcome for someone new to programming. That said, I only got into C because I was already tinkering with computers and BASIC, and I don't think my young curiosity about machines would have held if I were being instructed to learn them by an adult. Kids are funny like that.
niftich 10y ago
An anecdote about motivation: when I was in grade school, I made custom maps and scenarios for Starcraft (the original), with if-then-else conditionals, and the like. The official editor had a wizard where you would enter these, but it was extremely tedious to use, requiring lots of mouse clicks. Alternate editors were starting to come out that would let you enter these events as a script, so I turned to scripting instead. After a while, hand-writing the script was becoming a chore, so I wrote a code generator. I realized that the browser had a script interpreter and I could just use checkboxes and form inputs and lots of Javascript to manipulate a bunch of 'document.write()' statements to produce copy-pastable code. I had no interest in programming, and yet I using programming as a tool without realizing it.

hguant 10y ago

Honestly, the two things that kept me motivated to keep writing (actually writing, not just "oh hey this is cool") code when I was learning were games and my girlfriend. Games - We were learning how to play Pathfinder, so I wrote a little character creation thing in Python. Girlfriend - thought it was awesome when I wrote her letters that were interactive programs. Though I found out later she didn't want to go through multiple times to find everything I'd written, so she just skipped to reading the source.

tribby 10y ago

I'm glad to hear this is still happening! I learned C as a kid some 20 years ago writing a text-based RPG. It was just the right balance between "look everybody I made a game" and "wow there's a lot more to learn," which is a pretty ideal outcome for someone new to programming. That said, I only got into C because I was already tinkering with computers and BASIC, and I don't think my young curiosity about machines would have held if I were being instructed to learn them by an adult. Kids are funny like that.

niftich 10y ago

An anecdote about motivation: when I was in grade school, I made custom maps and scenarios for Starcraft (the original), with if-then-else conditionals, and the like. The official editor had a wizard where you would enter these, but it was extremely tedious to use, requiring lots of mouse clicks. Alternate editors were starting to come out that would let you enter these events as a script, so I turned to scripting instead. After a while, hand-writing the script was becoming a chore, so I wrote a code generator. I realized that the browser had a script interpreter and I could just use checkboxes and form inputs and lots of Javascript to manipulate a bunch of 'document.write()' statements to produce copy-pastable code. I had no interest in programming, and yet I using programming as a tool without realizing it.