'CodeSpells' Video Game Teaches Children Java Programming

CyberSlugGump writes "Computer scientists at UC San Diego have developed a 3D first-person video game designed to teach young students Java programming. In CodeSpells, a wizard must help a land of gnomes by writing spells in Java. Simple quests teach main Java components such as conditional and loop statements. Research presented March 8 at the 2013 SIGCSE Technical Symposium indicate that a test group of 40 girls aged 10-12 mastered many programming concepts in just one hour of playing."

Re:not a complete success

[Anonymous Coward]

Your joke was funny 15 years ago when Java was actually slow.

Re: How about Python or something?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason that Java isn't as fun to program is the same reason that it's good for businesses. The language is very restrictive and prescriptive of how you should do things. For programmers that want flexibility and power, the constraints and extra typing (dual-meaning intended) chafe. But when you're using it as part of a large group, those same constraints become the things you can depend on. Where is a certain class located? Java requires it to be in a certain directory. What methods are available on a class? Java's static type system was designed to make tooling easy, so your IDE will tell you. And even talented programmers can mess up manual memory management...the less-talented wouldn't stand a chance without Java's memory management. The list of things that Java prevents you from screwing up is quite long.

Basically, for my home coding projects and projects where I work with a small team of talented developers, Java is one of my last choices. But for my boring 9-5 job where I'm working with 30 knuckle-draggers who don't understand the purpose of an interface, let alone how to write functional code that's easy to read, I want them writing Java and I'm willing to pay the Java price to get that.

Lua with Minecraft + Tekkit mod

[uberbrainchild]

Try tekkit for minecraft, it will give you a mod called computercraft which will allow you to place computers with consoles on the map and even hook up wireless modems and a disk drive to them. Using lua you can then program these computers to do whatever you want basically, me and my brother made 3 train stations which would handle carts and track switches with the computers. You can even program "bots" with lua and have them build structures and whatnot. They can even defend your area if you want. All this is done with lua inside the minecraft game. You can of course import larger scripts from outside the game since typing them in the console minecraft provides can take a while.