Teach your Child to Program with XBox Game

The new video game Kodu will teach you (or your kid) about programming. It's also actually fun.

via Slate.com

Kodu, a newly released video game from Microsoft...aimed at the 9-and-over crowd. The mission: to place kids in an open-ended environment and arm them with a simple language that lets them build things. It's...a reminder that the mission of games like these is not actually to teach kids how to write code. It's to teach them how to think like programmers.... What are kids who play with Kodu actually learning? Kodu deliberately keeps out any mention of variables, functions, recursion, or any other programming argot. In fact, the interface is so friendly that players can be forgiven if they don't realize that they're learning anything at all. There is not currently any obvious bridge between the game and traditional coding—you aren't taught how to write out commands, and there's no way to look under the hood to see your rules translated into traditional code. What you are learning is how to build an environment. (read entire article here)


Neat! We wish this existed when we were kids.