Hello Fellow game dev'ers!

I've been tasked with teaching some younger folks (middle-school to junior high age) basic game development this summer. I'm not used to teaching at this age level, so I thought I'd solicit some advice from this very knowledgeable community.

I really want to shy away from teaching a programming language. I'd rather teach programming concepts through some kind of visual point-and-click program that is also be used to build games. We have a bit of a budget so the program doesn't necessarily have to be free/open source. What pieces of software like this exist?

We have about 4 days and a few hours each day with evenings to work on projects. Obviously the kids won't be able to obtain an in-depth knowledge of anything really in this short time, they just need to be able to present some kind of "final product" at the end of the 4 days.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Kevin

Hum, the best thing that comes to my mind is actually game maker , you can create pretty complex things with the event system, and it could be use to teach a few programming techniques and concepts, loops and other stuff like that.

I think pretty much every single program that has a event system would probably do the trick, you just have to prepare yourself well to be able to teach it correctly and in a fun way :).

Also, GM has one plus of being able to code in Cish like syntax, so you might be able to jump from events to the Game Maker Language if things go amazingly well :)

Best of luck

I'd rather teach programming concepts through some kind of visual point-and-click

This reads to me like "flowcharting". What middle-school kid doesn't love flowcharting?

But seriously, maybe a combination of designing game logic via flow charts (separate from the engine), and then implementing it in a basic scripting language (with some help from teacher)?

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I really like what I see over at http://scratched.media.mit.edu/ so I'm leaning towards this solution with Game Maker as a backup.

I'd like to show them some basic programming concepts like logic statements, looping structures, and basic object oriented stuff relating to methods & attributes. What I want to get away from is throwing a language like C at them and then having to spend 2 hours finding a missing semicolon. Granted, this can be a very real part of the process, but I think our time would be best spent working with a more "visual" code creation tool like Game Maker or Scratch.

[quote name='Prof G' timestamp='1357678290' post='5019190']
What I want to get away from is throwing a language like C at them and then having to spend 2 hours finding a missing semicolon.[/quote]

QFE.

I taught introductory web programming (HTML, CSS and Javascript/PHP) in university for a couple of semesters. 'Hunt the semicolon' described about half of our classroom time. Anything that can make the environment more forgiving of trivial mistakes is a win.

I would suggest teaching them using whatever language / platform they can easily get set up and running on their home computers so they can start practising / having fun at home.

Java or (dare I say it...) Visual Basic 6 which comes with Microsoft Office is a great one for teaching.

Then when they are ready for a language that they can learn and use for life... ween them slowly onto C++. ;)

Young ( under 12 ): Scratch or Squeek

Older: Lua