8 ms·

Bloxels – Build Your Own Video Games

paulryanrogers 9y ago
Takes the block-as-a-unit thing from Minecraft and has a side scroller engine to start with. There art editor cleverly separates the pixels, though I prefer more traditional paint programs. Reminds me of Klik & Play. That product relied on a spreadsheet or prompt-based effect definitions.
redwoolf 9y ago
I bought this for my kids about a year ago. The novelty wore off quickly, and they ended up only playing the demo game included with the app. The process of creating an image with the blox takes so long that the effort doesn't seem worth it. I've purchased a lot of these "get kids into tech" type toys over the years. I find that none of them have kept my kids interest nor have they really actually taught anything technical. Some were downright patronizing (I'm looking at you GoldieBlox). If we want to get kids interested in technology, we should be teaching them about technology, not creating abstractions on top technology and then teaching them the abstractions. I learned about computers with Murphy's Laws of Dos and Dos 4 on a monochrome screen. I knew that what I was doing was the same thing that professionals did, and I knew that the knowledge I was acquiring would be applicable in many settings. Later I learned Basic and HTML, and again these were tools used by professionals. We should stop lying to ourselves that these toys teach technology, and sit down with our kids and teach them how to build Pong with Pygame.
- le-mark 9y ago
  I suspected this maybe the case. I think there's an important distinction when relating your (and my) experience in the previous era with the current era. That is: expectations are much higher now. In the 80's we watched Matthew Broderick in Wargames having fantastic adventures with a green screen terminal and modem. We played pong, space invaders, and pac man. Today, kids use touch devices to watch videos on youtube and play triple A console games with incredible production quality. I learned about computers with Murphy's Laws of Dos and Dos 4 on a monochrome screen. I knew that what I was doing was the same thing that professionals did It's not obvious to kids today that that's what professionals are doing. As an adult I made a simple platformer and showed it to a few nontechnical friends. Their reactions were, 'why can't it do this', or 'are you going to fix the graphics?' ie very un-impressed, and honestly quite dis-spiriting. Imagine a kid creating a simple game today, won't impress her peers, and probably even lead to ridicule and scorn today.
  - redwoolf 9y ago
    That's a good point. I also spent a lot of time playing King's Quest II, which was simple enough that I could have created something similar (though much less sophisticated) at the same time. This is perhaps why kids are learning to program later in life than our generation.
    - djsumdog 9y ago
      Ugh KQ2 was the worst. That's the one with the timer right? And you had to walk down that crazy path without falling and made it back before the evil wizard work up until you finally killed him ... and didn't one part of the game require you to rub the magic teleportation stone until you got somewhere you needed to?
  - m0ther 9y ago
    I strongly believe consumers are blissfully unaware of how complex software can be (and what software is by nature more complex than what other software). It's not only a problem with the people you show your independent work to, it's a problem with non-technical management as well. I'd be very interested to understand a few of the ways non-technical people think programming works. If someone would put together some non-trivial demo, and get 100 non-technical people to speculate (in detail) on how they imagine it was made, I'd imagine the answers would be fascinating.
    - sbarre 9y ago
      > If someone would put together some non-trivial demo, and get 100 non-technical people to speculate (in detail) on how they imagine it was made, I'd imagine the answers would be fascinating. I've done a similar thought experiment over the years with (some very patient) non-technical friends, usually using some kind of mobile game on their phone... They all more or less worked out the high-level concepts (events and listeners, input controls, the game loop, objects/models, persistence, networking, etc) but that was about it.. No one could even start to explain how it worked beyond that..
    - wccrawford 9y ago
- indescions_2018 9y ago
  >>> sit down with our kids and teach them how to build Pong with Pygame Yeah, I absolutely agree with this. We underestimate a childs ability to compute. But are surprised to discover they are native to these interfaces. And can readily grok a VSCode write, build, and debug iteration loop. I don't think 10 is too young to get them started with Gimp, Inkscape and Blender either. Especially if you have a digital pen and tablet interface for painting. Although, I believe there is something to be said for visual programming. Modern takes on the old Logo and Turtle graphics paradigms. Seymour: Live Programming for the Classroom https://harc.github.io/seymour-live2017/ https://harc.github.io/seymour-live2017/
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    Music and audio production make extensive use of visual programming interfaces that produce production-quality output. Just look at the workflow for something like FLStudio or Processing. I personally started down this road around age 10. Also, old visual IDEs had a nice, quick programming loop. VB, back in the day, maybe check out Lazarus now.
- hmhrex 9y ago
  This is my concern with buying anything like this, or even using languages like Scratch. I learned by using a computer with the languages that exist for production software and web applications. The biggest thing for me is, how do we teach some of these concepts to our kids at a young? What does that kind of curriculum look like? I found "Teach Your Kids to Code" (https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Kids-Code-Parent-Friendly/dp/1593276141 https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Kids-Code-Parent-Friendly/...) the other day, and it looks promising, but I'd be interested in other resources as well. EDIT: I may be wrong about Scratch's usefulness as a teaching tool, it has just been a concern. I'd be glad to hear personal experiences!
  - redwoolf 9y ago
    If it's anything like "Learn to Program with Minecraft" then it's a waste of time. "Learn to Program with Minecraft" is too simple to be fun or useful.
    - imtringued 9y ago
      Download Minecraft. Install ComputerCraft mod. Write lua skripts to control turtles and computers. ??? Your kid now has obtained basic programming skills.
  - jbattle 9y ago
    My oldest son (the only one that's shown interest in programming) really liked Scratch. One feature of Scratch that I didn't expect to be part of the appeal was how easy they make it to share your work. Every time he build something, it was trivial for him to share it online for friends and strangers to see. He wasn't upvote-obsessed, but I do think that social-recognition element was a plus
  - follower 9y ago
    > how do we teach some of these concepts to our kids at a young? What does that kind of curriculum look like? To see one approach you might be interested in looking at the "Computer Science Unplugged" project: http://csunplugged.org/ http://csunplugged.org/
- jordanwallwork 9y ago
  I'm not surprised the novelty of this wore off quickly, it looks like it'd be agonisingly slow to make anything with this. Is this even intended to teach anything technical? It just looks like a generic platform builder with a really tedious interface
- cityzen 9y ago
  I've found the same. Bought robot turtles, lasted a few hours. Scratch is cool but too hard for my kids to envision a "finished product" beyond, "make the thing walk 3 steps and fart" (I have 2 boys). We also tried the whole code.org thing which has minecraft and star wars themes, not interested. What I did find, though, is that by taking something they're really interested in and finding a tech way to enhance their experience has been the key. I am putting my money on just constant, positive exposure to tech and how it can solve their problems or answer their curiosities. The thing I'm teaching my kids the most right now is hard work. You want to be a youtuber? great, do the work. Write a script, storyboard your project, plan it out. Don't just turn on the camera and start mumbling about minecraft. I have found that it's 100x easier for them to put in more time on something that doesn't feel like school. I know not everyone cares for Disney but if you and your kids have been to the parks, these two books have been amazing to my kids: Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making More Magic Real https://www.amazon.com/Walt-Disney-Imagineering-Behind-Dreams/dp/1423107667/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517582150&sr=8-1&keywords=imagineering https://www.amazon.com/Walt-Disney-Imagineering-Behind-Dream... The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic (From the Magic Kingdom) https://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Mansion-Imagineering-Classic-Kingdom/dp/1484722299/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517582385&sr=1-1&keywords=imagineering+haunted+mansion https://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Mansion-Imagineering-Classic-... Just really fun for them to understand all the work that goes into that magic they love.
  - hmhrex 9y ago
    This was helpful and enlightening. We have kids that we're planning on homeschooling. Finding curriculum or even good information on how to introduce technology to kids in a meaningful seems difficult.
  - always_good 9y ago
    My friends getting married and having children has gotten me thinking about how I would raise my own. I look at my best habits that started early on in my life and wonder how I developed them to begin with. I remember my friend James would come over to my house and we'd take turns writing stories in Word. Each of us would write a chapter from our character's POV while the other played Super Mario 64.That early interest in writing has served me all my life. We'd also spend hours taking turns on my computer building custom Heroes of Might and Magic maps/scenarios. But what gets someone to develop those creation-oriented interests instead of just being an idle consumer? And some of my ambitions, like programming, languished until I was in university and discovered amphetamine. Seems to be some mix of opportunity + a certain amount of destitution + luck.
- jason_slack 9y ago
  Thanks for recommending Pygame. I will check this out.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  I don't have kids, but have the same viewpoint from my personal experience growing up. Anything that is built to 'encourage child engagement' usually comes off as patronizing or boring. I learned about tech early on because I had natural curiosity and interest in it. My parents never went out of their way to 'encourage' me to learn about tech, and the things they did try to get me interested in never really stuck with me. The teaching toys are just toys, and will be treated as such.
- jslakro 9y ago
  ".. in Pygame" I suggest using Cocos2Dx
- Fordrus 9y ago
  On the other hand, I valiantly tried a number of variations of “learn C++ in a weekend” when I was a teenager, and finding most of them too difficult/annoying, presuming prior knowledge I didn’t have, I decided programming just wasn’t for me and focused on my violin playing. Now I’m neck-deep in bioinformatics and machine learning, enjoying more than almost anything else ever. In other words, I’ll cop to thinking you’re weong about this, and that sometime in the future, you or someone else will return to a thread similar to this one, wishing that someone had flattened out and simplified at least some of the technical aspects of this stuff so that you could move forward without such massive frustration that you would give up even despite substantial (but not invicible) motivation.
- mcphage 9y ago
  > If we want to get kids interested in technology, we should be teaching them about technology, not creating abstractions on top technology and then teaching them the abstractions. I learned about computers with Murphy's Laws of Dos and Dos 4 on a monochrome screen. I knew that what I was doing was the same thing that professionals did, and I knew that the knowledge I was acquiring would be applicable in many settings. Later I learned Basic and HTML, and again these were tools used by professionals. I'm glad that worked for you—and will work for plenty of kids. But there's also plenty of kids who want something different out of tech. If we envision only a single road into technology, we're only going to end up with the same sorts of people in technology that we've got now. Technology should have many roads into it, as many roads as there are ways for kids to look at the world.
- neovive 9y ago
  I experienced the same with my kids. Over the years, I purchased Bloxels, LittleBits, Lego EV3 and many other random tech toys. Unfortunately, the novelty wears off and they see little usage without parent intervention. Over the past decade, only the "big box of random Legos" is consistently used. I find persistence is a big problem with most tech toys. For example, if kids invest a lot of time building and coding an EV3 robot, they never want to take it apart and start over. Once you finally disassemble the project, it takes a while for them to gain interest again. Although Lego Technics and EV3 have a steeper learning curve, they're still great toys and both kids and parents really do learn a lot. However, the simplicity and creative possibilities of basic Lego bricks appeal to kids for many years. Legos, by far, have the highest "return on toy investment" in our house :).
  - busterarm 9y ago
    I had high hopes for the LittleBits synth kit and was a very early purchaser. Gave it as a gift to my then-14 year old niece -- really sharp kid -- she was bored of it within hours!
    - neovive 9y ago
      The synth kit was probably the most used collection of our LittleBits (kids were much younger than your niece). Unfortunately, the synth kit turned into one of those annoying "noisy toys" after a while :-)
- everdev 9y ago
  Same story with my kid. Nothing beats teaching them programming and then the world is theirs.
- book_mentioned 9y ago
  If they're already Minecraft-ing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16171204#16172852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16171204#16172852
- tomc1985 9y ago
  Three-year-olds can purportedly open Youtube, find their favorite channel, and naivgate to a video without any prior instruction. I think on HN a little while ago there was this study posted about how tribe of natives was given a box of tablets (with no prior exposure to them) and within a month were already hacking android. These silly little abstractions are not needed and, indeed, are patronizing. More turds sticking their hands out for money.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    > Three-year-olds can purportedly open Youtube, find their favorite channel, and naivgate to a video without any prior instruction. This doesn't make a lot of sense. Without prior experience with Youtube, how would they have a favorite channel?
    - tomc1985 9y ago
      Or any channel that appeals to them. Why get caught up on semantics? Lots of things do not make sense when it comes to children. I was hacking config.sys to get DOOM to run on a RAM-constrained 386, before I even knew how to read. Somehow I was successful...
- pharrington 9y ago
  Yeah. If you want your kids to use toys to make other toys, Little Big Planet, Minecraft, Mario Maker and the like are immaculately suited to this purpose. If you want to go the next step, pulling back the curtain to teach the concepts of algorithms and the like, actually teach those concepts and go native with Logo or Pygame or some other language/framework with a low syntactic overhead and access to a good REPL.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  > The process of creating an image with the blox takes so long that the effort doesn't seem worth it. This could well be the problem — for one of two reasons: Kids are perhaps less patient these days (no offense). But I remember spending ridiculous amounts of time wiring together circuits on one of those Radio Shack 100-in-1 Electronic Kits. It seemed worth it at the time. Did we (I) have more patience then? Or was making something "physical" come to life much more rewarding? Or maybe it's the old leading a horse to water problem....
- djsumdog 9y ago
  > sit down with our kids and teach them how to build Pong with Pygame. Or maybe take a really simple existing game, and try adding things to it. Let's add a new enemy? Something useful to the UI? I mean, you could even take your kid all the way through even submitting a pull request back for it. I'm sure there are like a bijillion Tetris clones up on Github in every language imaginable.
- abrookewood 9y ago
  My kids (11 & 9) both love Scratch for what it's worth. I spend a bit of time helping them with bugs or more complex requirements, but they are pretty happy forking other people's games and mashing them together with graphics and music borrowed from the Internet.
- crimsonalucard 9y ago
  Pong sucks though. Not even kidding, that's what most kids will say. Nirvana is educational pokemon.
  - krapp 9y ago
    You have to learn to crawl before you can walk. Many aspiring game developers seem to want to start off making first person zombie shooters in Unity and they suck too. Although maybe start with Arkanoid or Space Invaders. Maybe Pong is too simple.
    - crimsonalucard 9y ago
      It's not about simplicity and more about what kids are attracted too.
  - redwoolf 9y ago
    Pong wasn't the point...
k1ns 9y ago
As a learning/teaching tool that fosters creative thinking, this looks really cool. I think the idea of having a physical medium that represents an abstract model of an area of your world is also a really neat idea. I will definitely be picking this up for my kids (once they're a bit older).
larrydag 9y ago
We got this for my son and he plays it now and again. He's fairly creative and loves Scratch too. A good gauge is if your child likes Scratch then this is a good compliment.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Makes me remember learning how to do sprites on my C=64 using graph paper. But, then I got a proper sprite editor and never looked back. I kinda think this would get old quick like the graph paper did for me.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Yea the photos made me think of The 8-Bit Guy videos and him showing how to create sprites using graph paper.
tombert 9y ago
Honestly, whenever I've wanted to teach people how to get into programming, I usually just try and teach them the "real" tools for it; something like Unity or Scirra Construct is powerful enough to actually make something commercial, but simple enough to get started that it's not super intimidating (in my opinion). While it's (rightfully) lambasted nowadays, I actually feel like Flash was a good way to get started as well, since it's a lot more interactive than opening up Vim and writing C++. That said, as a grown-up I quite like these "intro-to-programming" kits for myself. I spent more hours making little toys in Pico-8, eventually leading to a simple raycasting engine.
jason_slack 9y ago
I found out about this yesterday when I posted this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16282594#16286614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16282594#16286614 What I don't see, when visiting their site is now to order less than a 5 pack. It seems you can't just order one board and blocks.
- calebh 9y ago
  I highly recommend GameMaker for teaching programming (this is actually how I started programming). The drag and drop interface is easy to understand, while also being powerful enough to use on real projects. There are even numerous examples of successful indie games that have used GameMaker. It's pretty great for rapid prototyping in game jams as well.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Hotline Miami I and II were both in GameMaker (IIRC).
_jrk_ 9y ago
My son has enjoyed making games in Roblox Studio more than anything else. It's scripting language (Lua) has been easy for us to learn together.
otterpro 9y ago
I support tools and software that help kids learn technology and coding. I really like the idea and the simplicity, and the cool 13x13 pixel concept, but I can't get over the pricing just to get access to its online EDU hub (license is $100 for 25 students) or classroom packs (which is more expensive but also more acceptable since it includes physical pixel boards). Perhaps I feel grumpy for its over-commercialization of education from Mattel, one of the largest toy company in the world. Another is the several patents that they have on the concept, which irks me. Scratch is not perfect, but it is at least free, and access to own accounts and community is free. Also, I think we're giving our kids too much screen time. When I was a kid, the most helpful concept of programming was not a programming language or software, but rather it was just learning the concept of logic and playing with "and" and "or" with electronics and transistors / gates / switches. For that, I think electronics kit (Heathkit) were awesome.
lerie82 9y ago
Nothing loads for me. When I try to hit back in the browser by using the shortcut keys, it shows the game loaded for a moment then goes back to the loading screen. When I first loaded the page I knew I was going to have issues when I selected my language but the modal never went away.
sirsuki 9y ago
Tried the demo in Firefox on my Linux box and load average spiked to 20+ and froze the computer for 10 minutes till FF eventually crashed. That is NOT how one should write JavaScript. Considering this a malicious concept will never purchase.
- rjmunro 9y ago
  That's a bug in Firefox or some other part of your setup - no matter what the JS of a website does, even if it is deliberately engineered to be malicious, it should not be able to cause the computer to freeze.
wiremine 9y ago
We purchased this for my 11 year old at Christmas, and he's been enjoying it very much. He's also into Scratch, and I asked him why he likes them both: he said the Bloxel code is more limited, but is easier to prototype ideas. Scratch is more flexible, but also more time consuming.
djrogers 9y ago
This seems a lot more like ‘build your own maps’ for a side scrolling engine than ‘build your own video games’.
iteriteratedone 9y ago
No one "gets into tech" ... a child explores and then becomes an adult and decides to explore more or stop and enjoy the fruits frim others. Bruce Lee, Van Gough, Bill Gates ... are all explorers. Allow your kid to explore and you will see if tech is right for them. Explore building (legos) , explore culture (food music) , explore spirituality (religion) ... your kid will choose you their affinity Legos turns to physics which turns to civil engineering or software ... but your kid might rather build using sound (music) than algebra (code) ... let them build and explore... as the parent make sure its saftely

Takes the block-as-a-unit thing from Minecraft and has a side scroller engine to start with. There art editor cleverly separates the pixels, though I prefer more traditional paint programs. Reminds me of Klik & Play. That product relied on a spreadsheet or prompt-based effect definitions.

redwoolf 9y ago

I bought this for my kids about a year ago. The novelty wore off quickly, and they ended up only playing the demo game included with the app. The process of creating an image with the blox takes so long that the effort doesn't seem worth it. I've purchased a lot of these "get kids into tech" type toys over the years. I find that none of them have kept my kids interest nor have they really actually taught anything technical. Some were downright patronizing (I'm looking at you GoldieBlox). If we want to get kids interested in technology, we should be teaching them about technology, not creating abstractions on top technology and then teaching them the abstractions. I learned about computers with Murphy's Laws of Dos and Dos 4 on a monochrome screen. I knew that what I was doing was the same thing that professionals did, and I knew that the knowledge I was acquiring would be applicable in many settings. Later I learned Basic and HTML, and again these were tools used by professionals. We should stop lying to ourselves that these toys teach technology, and sit down with our kids and teach them how to build Pong with Pygame.

le-mark 9y ago
I suspected this maybe the case. I think there's an important distinction when relating your (and my) experience in the previous era with the current era. That is: expectations are much higher now. In the 80's we watched Matthew Broderick in Wargames having fantastic adventures with a green screen terminal and modem. We played pong, space invaders, and pac man. Today, kids use touch devices to watch videos on youtube and play triple A console games with incredible production quality. I learned about computers with Murphy's Laws of Dos and Dos 4 on a monochrome screen. I knew that what I was doing was the same thing that professionals did It's not obvious to kids today that that's what professionals are doing. As an adult I made a simple platformer and showed it to a few nontechnical friends. Their reactions were, 'why can't it do this', or 'are you going to fix the graphics?' ie very un-impressed, and honestly quite dis-spiriting. Imagine a kid creating a simple game today, won't impress her peers, and probably even lead to ridicule and scorn today.
- redwoolf 9y ago
  That's a good point. I also spent a lot of time playing King's Quest II, which was simple enough that I could have created something similar (though much less sophisticated) at the same time. This is perhaps why kids are learning to program later in life than our generation.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Ugh KQ2 was the worst. That's the one with the timer right? And you had to walk down that crazy path without falling and made it back before the evil wizard work up until you finally killed him ... and didn't one part of the game require you to rub the magic teleportation stone until you got somewhere you needed to?
- m0ther 9y ago
  I strongly believe consumers are blissfully unaware of how complex software can be (and what software is by nature more complex than what other software). It's not only a problem with the people you show your independent work to, it's a problem with non-technical management as well. I'd be very interested to understand a few of the ways non-technical people think programming works. If someone would put together some non-trivial demo, and get 100 non-technical people to speculate (in detail) on how they imagine it was made, I'd imagine the answers would be fascinating.
  - sbarre 9y ago
    > If someone would put together some non-trivial demo, and get 100 non-technical people to speculate (in detail) on how they imagine it was made, I'd imagine the answers would be fascinating. I've done a similar thought experiment over the years with (some very patient) non-technical friends, usually using some kind of mobile game on their phone... They all more or less worked out the high-level concepts (events and listeners, input controls, the game loop, objects/models, persistence, networking, etc) but that was about it.. No one could even start to explain how it worked beyond that..
  - wccrawford 9y ago
indescions_2018 9y ago
>>> sit down with our kids and teach them how to build Pong with Pygame Yeah, I absolutely agree with this. We underestimate a childs ability to compute. But are surprised to discover they are native to these interfaces. And can readily grok a VSCode write, build, and debug iteration loop. I don't think 10 is too young to get them started with Gimp, Inkscape and Blender either. Especially if you have a digital pen and tablet interface for painting. Although, I believe there is something to be said for visual programming. Modern takes on the old Logo and Turtle graphics paradigms. Seymour: Live Programming for the Classroom https://harc.github.io/seymour-live2017/ https://harc.github.io/seymour-live2017/
- tomc1985 9y ago
  Music and audio production make extensive use of visual programming interfaces that produce production-quality output. Just look at the workflow for something like FLStudio or Processing. I personally started down this road around age 10. Also, old visual IDEs had a nice, quick programming loop. VB, back in the day, maybe check out Lazarus now.
hmhrex 9y ago
This is my concern with buying anything like this, or even using languages like Scratch. I learned by using a computer with the languages that exist for production software and web applications. The biggest thing for me is, how do we teach some of these concepts to our kids at a young? What does that kind of curriculum look like? I found "Teach Your Kids to Code" (https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Kids-Code-Parent-Friendly/dp/1593276141 https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Kids-Code-Parent-Friendly/...) the other day, and it looks promising, but I'd be interested in other resources as well. EDIT: I may be wrong about Scratch's usefulness as a teaching tool, it has just been a concern. I'd be glad to hear personal experiences!
- redwoolf 9y ago
  If it's anything like "Learn to Program with Minecraft" then it's a waste of time. "Learn to Program with Minecraft" is too simple to be fun or useful.
  - imtringued 9y ago
    Download Minecraft. Install ComputerCraft mod. Write lua skripts to control turtles and computers. ??? Your kid now has obtained basic programming skills.
- jbattle 9y ago
  My oldest son (the only one that's shown interest in programming) really liked Scratch. One feature of Scratch that I didn't expect to be part of the appeal was how easy they make it to share your work. Every time he build something, it was trivial for him to share it online for friends and strangers to see. He wasn't upvote-obsessed, but I do think that social-recognition element was a plus
- follower 9y ago
  > how do we teach some of these concepts to our kids at a young? What does that kind of curriculum look like? To see one approach you might be interested in looking at the "Computer Science Unplugged" project: http://csunplugged.org/ http://csunplugged.org/
jordanwallwork 9y ago
I'm not surprised the novelty of this wore off quickly, it looks like it'd be agonisingly slow to make anything with this. Is this even intended to teach anything technical? It just looks like a generic platform builder with a really tedious interface
cityzen 9y ago
I've found the same. Bought robot turtles, lasted a few hours. Scratch is cool but too hard for my kids to envision a "finished product" beyond, "make the thing walk 3 steps and fart" (I have 2 boys). We also tried the whole code.org thing which has minecraft and star wars themes, not interested. What I did find, though, is that by taking something they're really interested in and finding a tech way to enhance their experience has been the key. I am putting my money on just constant, positive exposure to tech and how it can solve their problems or answer their curiosities. The thing I'm teaching my kids the most right now is hard work. You want to be a youtuber? great, do the work. Write a script, storyboard your project, plan it out. Don't just turn on the camera and start mumbling about minecraft. I have found that it's 100x easier for them to put in more time on something that doesn't feel like school. I know not everyone cares for Disney but if you and your kids have been to the parks, these two books have been amazing to my kids: Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making More Magic Real https://www.amazon.com/Walt-Disney-Imagineering-Behind-Dreams/dp/1423107667/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517582150&sr=8-1&keywords=imagineering https://www.amazon.com/Walt-Disney-Imagineering-Behind-Dream... The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic (From the Magic Kingdom) https://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Mansion-Imagineering-Classic-Kingdom/dp/1484722299/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517582385&sr=1-1&keywords=imagineering+haunted+mansion https://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Mansion-Imagineering-Classic-... Just really fun for them to understand all the work that goes into that magic they love.
- hmhrex 9y ago
  This was helpful and enlightening. We have kids that we're planning on homeschooling. Finding curriculum or even good information on how to introduce technology to kids in a meaningful seems difficult.
- always_good 9y ago
  My friends getting married and having children has gotten me thinking about how I would raise my own. I look at my best habits that started early on in my life and wonder how I developed them to begin with. I remember my friend James would come over to my house and we'd take turns writing stories in Word. Each of us would write a chapter from our character's POV while the other played Super Mario 64.That early interest in writing has served me all my life. We'd also spend hours taking turns on my computer building custom Heroes of Might and Magic maps/scenarios. But what gets someone to develop those creation-oriented interests instead of just being an idle consumer? And some of my ambitions, like programming, languished until I was in university and discovered amphetamine. Seems to be some mix of opportunity + a certain amount of destitution + luck.
jason_slack 9y ago
Thanks for recommending Pygame. I will check this out.
nxsynonym 9y ago
I don't have kids, but have the same viewpoint from my personal experience growing up. Anything that is built to 'encourage child engagement' usually comes off as patronizing or boring. I learned about tech early on because I had natural curiosity and interest in it. My parents never went out of their way to 'encourage' me to learn about tech, and the things they did try to get me interested in never really stuck with me. The teaching toys are just toys, and will be treated as such.
jslakro 9y ago
".. in Pygame" I suggest using Cocos2Dx
Fordrus 9y ago
On the other hand, I valiantly tried a number of variations of “learn C++ in a weekend” when I was a teenager, and finding most of them too difficult/annoying, presuming prior knowledge I didn’t have, I decided programming just wasn’t for me and focused on my violin playing. Now I’m neck-deep in bioinformatics and machine learning, enjoying more than almost anything else ever. In other words, I’ll cop to thinking you’re weong about this, and that sometime in the future, you or someone else will return to a thread similar to this one, wishing that someone had flattened out and simplified at least some of the technical aspects of this stuff so that you could move forward without such massive frustration that you would give up even despite substantial (but not invicible) motivation.
mcphage 9y ago
> If we want to get kids interested in technology, we should be teaching them about technology, not creating abstractions on top technology and then teaching them the abstractions. I learned about computers with Murphy's Laws of Dos and Dos 4 on a monochrome screen. I knew that what I was doing was the same thing that professionals did, and I knew that the knowledge I was acquiring would be applicable in many settings. Later I learned Basic and HTML, and again these were tools used by professionals. I'm glad that worked for you—and will work for plenty of kids. But there's also plenty of kids who want something different out of tech. If we envision only a single road into technology, we're only going to end up with the same sorts of people in technology that we've got now. Technology should have many roads into it, as many roads as there are ways for kids to look at the world.
neovive 9y ago
I experienced the same with my kids. Over the years, I purchased Bloxels, LittleBits, Lego EV3 and many other random tech toys. Unfortunately, the novelty wears off and they see little usage without parent intervention. Over the past decade, only the "big box of random Legos" is consistently used. I find persistence is a big problem with most tech toys. For example, if kids invest a lot of time building and coding an EV3 robot, they never want to take it apart and start over. Once you finally disassemble the project, it takes a while for them to gain interest again. Although Lego Technics and EV3 have a steeper learning curve, they're still great toys and both kids and parents really do learn a lot. However, the simplicity and creative possibilities of basic Lego bricks appeal to kids for many years. Legos, by far, have the highest "return on toy investment" in our house :).
- busterarm 9y ago
  I had high hopes for the LittleBits synth kit and was a very early purchaser. Gave it as a gift to my then-14 year old niece -- really sharp kid -- she was bored of it within hours!
  - neovive 9y ago
    The synth kit was probably the most used collection of our LittleBits (kids were much younger than your niece). Unfortunately, the synth kit turned into one of those annoying "noisy toys" after a while :-)
everdev 9y ago
Same story with my kid. Nothing beats teaching them programming and then the world is theirs.
book_mentioned 9y ago
If they're already Minecraft-ing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16171204#16172852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16171204#16172852
tomc1985 9y ago
Three-year-olds can purportedly open Youtube, find their favorite channel, and naivgate to a video without any prior instruction. I think on HN a little while ago there was this study posted about how tribe of natives was given a box of tablets (with no prior exposure to them) and within a month were already hacking android. These silly little abstractions are not needed and, indeed, are patronizing. More turds sticking their hands out for money.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > Three-year-olds can purportedly open Youtube, find their favorite channel, and naivgate to a video without any prior instruction. This doesn't make a lot of sense. Without prior experience with Youtube, how would they have a favorite channel?
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    Or any channel that appeals to them. Why get caught up on semantics? Lots of things do not make sense when it comes to children. I was hacking config.sys to get DOOM to run on a RAM-constrained 386, before I even knew how to read. Somehow I was successful...
pharrington 9y ago
Yeah. If you want your kids to use toys to make other toys, Little Big Planet, Minecraft, Mario Maker and the like are immaculately suited to this purpose. If you want to go the next step, pulling back the curtain to teach the concepts of algorithms and the like, actually teach those concepts and go native with Logo or Pygame or some other language/framework with a low syntactic overhead and access to a good REPL.
JKCalhoun 9y ago
> The process of creating an image with the blox takes so long that the effort doesn't seem worth it. This could well be the problem — for one of two reasons: Kids are perhaps less patient these days (no offense). But I remember spending ridiculous amounts of time wiring together circuits on one of those Radio Shack 100-in-1 Electronic Kits. It seemed worth it at the time. Did we (I) have more patience then? Or was making something "physical" come to life much more rewarding? Or maybe it's the old leading a horse to water problem....
djsumdog 9y ago
> sit down with our kids and teach them how to build Pong with Pygame. Or maybe take a really simple existing game, and try adding things to it. Let's add a new enemy? Something useful to the UI? I mean, you could even take your kid all the way through even submitting a pull request back for it. I'm sure there are like a bijillion Tetris clones up on Github in every language imaginable.
abrookewood 9y ago
My kids (11 & 9) both love Scratch for what it's worth. I spend a bit of time helping them with bugs or more complex requirements, but they are pretty happy forking other people's games and mashing them together with graphics and music borrowed from the Internet.
crimsonalucard 9y ago
Pong sucks though. Not even kidding, that's what most kids will say. Nirvana is educational pokemon.
- krapp 9y ago
  You have to learn to crawl before you can walk. Many aspiring game developers seem to want to start off making first person zombie shooters in Unity and they suck too. Although maybe start with Arkanoid or Space Invaders. Maybe Pong is too simple.
  - crimsonalucard 9y ago
    It's not about simplicity and more about what kids are attracted too.
- redwoolf 9y ago
  Pong wasn't the point...

k1ns 9y ago

As a learning/teaching tool that fosters creative thinking, this looks really cool. I think the idea of having a physical medium that represents an abstract model of an area of your world is also a really neat idea. I will definitely be picking this up for my kids (once they're a bit older).

larrydag 9y ago

We got this for my son and he plays it now and again. He's fairly creative and loves Scratch too. A good gauge is if your child likes Scratch then this is a good compliment.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

Makes me remember learning how to do sprites on my C=64 using graph paper. But, then I got a proper sprite editor and never looked back. I kinda think this would get old quick like the graph paper did for me.

djsumdog 9y ago
Yea the photos made me think of The 8-Bit Guy videos and him showing how to create sprites using graph paper.

tombert 9y ago

Honestly, whenever I've wanted to teach people how to get into programming, I usually just try and teach them the "real" tools for it; something like Unity or Scirra Construct is powerful enough to actually make something commercial, but simple enough to get started that it's not super intimidating (in my opinion). While it's (rightfully) lambasted nowadays, I actually feel like Flash was a good way to get started as well, since it's a lot more interactive than opening up Vim and writing C++. That said, as a grown-up I quite like these "intro-to-programming" kits for myself. I spent more hours making little toys in Pico-8, eventually leading to a simple raycasting engine.

jason_slack 9y ago

I found out about this yesterday when I posted this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16282594#16286614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16282594#16286614 What I don't see, when visiting their site is now to order less than a 5 pack. It seems you can't just order one board and blocks.

calebh 9y ago
I highly recommend GameMaker for teaching programming (this is actually how I started programming). The drag and drop interface is easy to understand, while also being powerful enough to use on real projects. There are even numerous examples of successful indie games that have used GameMaker. It's pretty great for rapid prototyping in game jams as well.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Hotline Miami I and II were both in GameMaker (IIRC).

_jrk_ 9y ago

My son has enjoyed making games in Roblox Studio more than anything else. It's scripting language (Lua) has been easy for us to learn together.

otterpro 9y ago

I support tools and software that help kids learn technology and coding. I really like the idea and the simplicity, and the cool 13x13 pixel concept, but I can't get over the pricing just to get access to its online EDU hub (license is $100 for 25 students) or classroom packs (which is more expensive but also more acceptable since it includes physical pixel boards). Perhaps I feel grumpy for its over-commercialization of education from Mattel, one of the largest toy company in the world. Another is the several patents that they have on the concept, which irks me. Scratch is not perfect, but it is at least free, and access to own accounts and community is free. Also, I think we're giving our kids too much screen time. When I was a kid, the most helpful concept of programming was not a programming language or software, but rather it was just learning the concept of logic and playing with "and" and "or" with electronics and transistors / gates / switches. For that, I think electronics kit (Heathkit) were awesome.

lerie82 9y ago

Nothing loads for me. When I try to hit back in the browser by using the shortcut keys, it shows the game loaded for a moment then goes back to the loading screen. When I first loaded the page I knew I was going to have issues when I selected my language but the modal never went away.

sirsuki 9y ago

Tried the demo in Firefox on my Linux box and load average spiked to 20+ and froze the computer for 10 minutes till FF eventually crashed. That is NOT how one should write JavaScript. Considering this a malicious concept will never purchase.

rjmunro 9y ago
That's a bug in Firefox or some other part of your setup - no matter what the JS of a website does, even if it is deliberately engineered to be malicious, it should not be able to cause the computer to freeze.

wiremine 9y ago

We purchased this for my 11 year old at Christmas, and he's been enjoying it very much. He's also into Scratch, and I asked him why he likes them both: he said the Bloxel code is more limited, but is easier to prototype ideas. Scratch is more flexible, but also more time consuming.

djrogers 9y ago

This seems a lot more like ‘build your own maps’ for a side scrolling engine than ‘build your own video games’.

iteriteratedone 9y ago

No one "gets into tech" ... a child explores and then becomes an adult and decides to explore more or stop and enjoy the fruits frim others. Bruce Lee, Van Gough, Bill Gates ... are all explorers. Allow your kid to explore and you will see if tech is right for them. Explore building (legos) , explore culture (food music) , explore spirituality (religion) ... your kid will choose you their affinity Legos turns to physics which turns to civil engineering or software ... but your kid might rather build using sound (music) than algebra (code) ... let them build and explore... as the parent make sure its saftely