My son, 11, is interested in learning to code. His long term goal would be building games. Is there a language and/or course or curriculum that I should look into? What would you recommend for a novice?
I’m a web developer so I can help him with some of the concepts and knowledge. I’d be interested to hear anyone that has experience with these things.
I learned how to make iOS apps using this Hacking with Swift course which is free. One of the things that will interest your son, is that he has you create some simple games along the way that I had fun playing on my iPhone.
I’d recommend Swift Bootcamp in this channel. Nick went into the basics and hand hold you throughout the video. I’d recommend you complement Hacking with Swift with this.
Is he interested in making games for iOS or console/PC? Those are very different things and have very different requirements, coding methodologies, and mental models, and he’d be better off learning how to code on a Windows PC if he plans on making console/PC games one day.
Since they’re interested in games, I’d suggest Godot. Really fun game development environment that will take you all the way to cross-platform production.
For an adult learning it, I’d recommend official docs, KidsCanCode and ChatGPT for your GDScript questions.
For a kid, I think some of that should also work, but I’d let them do a lot of playing with the built-in creative tools and GUI-based settings and do the scripting for them early on.
Console/PC. He’s only 11, so who knows. He does not have a phone though, although I suppose he could develop/test using his iPad.
Yes, an iPad would work too.
I’ve not yet listened, but the show notes have some interesting links for an iPad coder.
I’d suggest avoiding learning how to code iPhone/ipad/Mac then. Swift and game development are different worlds. I don’t really know where to start with game development, but I know not to start with Swift.
I agree. I wouldn’t point him to Swift. I thought about python as a starter. I don’t know with the gaming angle though.
There are plenty of popular games in the iOS universe, I don’t think it’s a bad place to start. I think Swift is well designed and a good way to learn good coding hygiene. He can of course delve into Console/PC coding eventually. I don’t think one should focus too much on that for an 11 year old. It’s more important to learn good coding principles and go from there.
I don’t think one should focus too much on that for an 11 year old
Now that I agree with. I’ve just heard that Swift is a complicated language to start on. I know there are easier options out there, or perhaps options that better reveal the basics of development. However, everyone who has used it knows more than me. So if it teaches good coding hygiene then it could be a good option.
As for the gaming aspect, there’s not really a language he needs to know. Once you learn a couple languages and know how development works it’s not hard to pick up new languages. But if there’s a gaming component to his early education I think that would serve to motivate him.
He could probably start with Unity. A pretty classic early game dev’s tutorial would be recreating Pong in Unity.