Transition year programming

[Aphra K]

I just got a very nice handwritten (!) letter from a transition year teacher in Kildare who saw a piece about gamedevelopers.ie/games in e-Thurs supplement of the Indo.

anyway, he is teaching a little QBasic to his students to give them an idea of programming and wanted to know what might be more appropriate to prepare his students for the games sector.

Now this is where I need a little advice…what should I say to him? Maybe QBasic is an ok introduction to games programming for people of that age? What do you think???

I’ll forward on your advice to him..

but great to see teachers taking this initiative..

Aphra.

[Anonymous]

I think Basic/Q Basic is a great introducion to the basics of programming itself.

But its also perfect to demonstarte the very basic ordering and maintenance of a game application, the only real ‘issue’ I’d imagine is visualisation if they are working in a console.

So something like Xies and Oies to demonstarte input and output with recursive structure.

[Aphra K]

em..I’ll be referring him to you to explain those terms!

Aphra.

[Anonymous]

Why not just go straight into Java?
Get straight into OO and you can do a lot of introductary programming things very easily with it. In DCU I think they had some sort of “program the robot to move through the maze” in java for first year’s to get them into it. Started the year after me, so dunno how good it was but the concept sounded good.

As for “people of that age”, I don’t really think thats really a big issue especially if they’re interesting in learning something about programming and the teaching is simple enough. Give them basic building blocks with some sort of GUI to see their outputs if need be, but otherwise, anything should be fine i think. Its how much you want to teach is the bigger question.

Don’t really see the point in teaching a language you’re never going to use again.

[Anonymous]

If he already knows Basic, get him to have a look at DarkBasic ( http://www.darkbasic.com ).

They have a free-for-schools item at http://darkbasic.thegamecreators.com/?f=freeforschools

> Don’t really see the point in teaching a language you’re never going to use again.

Coding is coding, if he only knows Basic, DarkBasic is a lot better than QuickBasic.

If he as any non-coding students, he could maybe set up a template game, and his 3D art-only students would be able to design levels in say Blender ( again, free at http://www.blender.org ) or 3DS Max etc, and test them out in his coded game.

It’s great to see more and more lecturers / teachers taking the initiative and offering this type of course, by adapting their current skills and resources.

Mal

[Anonymous]

Ah, missed the bit where it said he knew basic. Thought it was a completely open thing. With some knowledge of a language, you may as well stick with it.

Coding is coding[/quote:f989bc515a]
Oh yeah, I agree….I did lots of languages in uni and seeing as the differences makes learning new ones easier but I also think that I spent a lot of time in uni learning completely pointless languages that I’ll never look at again ( cobol & ml being the main ones )

Milkshape is another good free 3D modeller with lots of support.

[Anonymous]

[Aphra K]

I will write or mail him back with the suggestions and maybe see if he wants to post on the forums as to how he gets on..

Aphra.

[Anonymous]

i agree dark basic is the job for intro to games.
very easy, very fast to get going and with little code you got a game.

As someone already mentioned its free to schools, my dad works in a secondary school in tipperary and he received a couple of licenses to use it for transition years. dont know tho did they in the end. that was about 14-15 months ago. they started a java course ran in association with tipp institute and sun microsystems so i think that may have stamped on that.

also regarding that robot game. theres a couple of frameworks which support this.

robocode by ibm, program bots to fight in an arena using java. very easy to start with.

Also aphra, j.manning@cs.ucc.ie could tell you about a java conversion of a program called “karl the robot” which i think was originally created by berkley to teach students c++, but joe developed a similar java conversion with a girl in my class from college 2 years ago. works very well and was\is been used in u.c.c. to teach students fundamentals of oo in 1st year.

also if you want details on that java\sun thing the school had running, i can ask them how they got involved with it. i think the students even got sun certs or something for their efforts, which is very good.

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