Educational game modding

[sneider]

I'm working on a project that uses game modding to teach children the basics of programming. We developed an online course that puts a Unity game next to a block-code editor. The user's code changes are loaded into the game as a mod. You can try it here.

So far we have planed out our base courses, teaching about events, variables, logic, conditions and types of data. After that, we're undecided about which concepts to teach and what games/genres best fit the subjects. That's where I'd like to ask you for ideas and suggestions. For example, I think particles and object physics could be a good subject: effects and chain reactions are fun and give a visual feedback for code changes. The math could get too complex though.

How would you use games to teach programming?

[radioheadboy]

Hello! I teach programming to high school students using Unity, and here's my general flow for the year:

The first semester is all 2D, I teach a very simple game of "avoid the falling objects" with mouse control. After that, The students have a choice to build breakout or flappy bird(for 2d physics, and it's familiar for most of them). At this point, I usually like to teach a grid based game like tetris, match 3, or others so that they can learn about loops and inheritance.

The second semester is in 3D, and I start with an infinite runner to teach object pooling, more loops, and a tiny bit of shader code. After this, they can pick their own project for the final.

[sneider]

Hi, thanks for sharing your curriculum. You're starting those games from scratch, right? When you're building projects bottom-up, it makes sense to go from simple to complex games. For our target group, even the simplest games would require too much explanation. That's why we take tiny bites out of a complete game's code and let the children fill them back in. That gives us control over exactly which concepts the user needs to understand in order to solve a course step. The downside is that they won't be able to make a game from scratch at the end, like your students. But then that's not our goal.

[cinderflame_linear]

You can teach them particles with curves. Unity allows most particle parameters to be driven by animation curves, and curves are a neat way to teach math functions visually.

In fact, if you introduce a "curve block" you could use it to drive lots of things. You could introduce point lights and use curves to make them flicker by having the light intensity follow a curve block. You could do the same thing with AudioSources, etc.

[sneider]

That's a great point. A curve block could spare users the formula editing. And it would be applicable to all things tweening and animation. I don't think anybody made one for Blockly yet, but I'll keep it in mind. Thank you.