Games

______ GAMES and ANIMATION _______

Scratch or Hopscotch are great places for any new coder, especially young coders, to start.   If you want to go beyond that, look over the resources below or check out this 2 page annotated list of game design tools / game making software.  

• Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/    Create interactive stories, games, music and art - and share them online. Scratch is a visual programming environment (you don't have to type or worry about syntax; you just move blocks of code into action) designed for kids in grade school and up. Why Scratch first?  Celebrate Scratch Day in May!  Online community for Scratch teachers

• Alice  www.alice.org Using an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create animations or games, the Alice Project seeks to provide tools and materials for a conceptual core of computational thinking, problem solving, and computer programming.

• Bootstrap  www.bootstrapworld.org  Bootstrap is a free curriculum for students ages 12-16, which teaches them to program their own videogames using algebra as the vehicle for creating images and animations.  Recommended by the CSTA.

• Codea http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/  is a $10 app for the iPad that lets you program your own games, with an easy to use language (based on Lua) and many of the iPad's touches and gestures.

• GameMaker www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/studio  an easy to use game making platform; simple tutorials here

• Hopscotch   www.gethopscotch.com  Kids are creative.  Empower them to create anything they can imagine with Hopscotch, a free, visual programming language for the iPad. Just released 4-2013 video  article  @hopscotch

•  Kodu   http://kodu.en.softonic.com/   is a visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The visual nature of the language allows for rapid design iteration using only an Xbox game controller for input (mouse/keyboard input is also supported). Monthly challenge here: Feb 2013 challenge is a Mars Rover navigation

• Lua www.lua.org is a fast, compact, scripting language that is a popular for writing games (e.g. World of Warcraft and Angry Birds.)  

• Python  www.python.org  Python is a popular, powerful, free (open source)  real world programming language. You can also use it to create cool games.  Here's a free book that shows you how.