The games themselves are really fun. One is a simple vaguely Asteroids-like base defense game. The second is a sort of Angry Birds-like cannon game complete with physics and particle system effects. The third is a platformer in the spirit of Mario Bros with auto-generated infinite levels.
Game Maven is an interactive tutorial using live code. Players learn step-by-step how to build each game, getting a chance to customize and play with the games as they build them. Game Maven is an immersive educational experience with a focus on action over explanation. Players build right away with code, learning about coding by coding. Be brave, make mistakes, try things, and see what happens.
Game Maven assumes some programming experience and an interest in writing games. It’s for adults and older teens (age 16+). It’s designed for a variety of motivation levels, from those that just click through the lessons and skip most of the work, to those that do every lesson, understand every line of code, and spend hours customizing the games, everyone learns from the experience.
If you have a teenager interested in coding and writing games, please let them know about Game Maven. Please tell your friends with teenagers about Game Maven. If you want to play with writing games yourself, go give it a try. And please let me know what you think!
3 comments:
Greg,
Great work and tutorial.
Thanks a ton for the knowledge sharing. It's indeed fun to learn the nuts and bolts of what goes in a simple 2d game especially with java script and objects. Keep up with the good work.
Greg - I am a front end developer, and my son and I have been coding this week (inspired by The Hour of Code.) We just found Code Monster and Code Maven today and we are having a ball.
Thanks so much for taking the time to create these sites. I hope many, many kids find them and get hooked on coding.
Best,
Niki
Hi Greg, I love your Code Monster and Game Maven, exactly the resource I've been looking for to help teach my kids.
I have two ideas (1) there ought to be a "show source" at any stage to reveal the actual code (plumbing, etc.) needed to run the code outside your system; (2) You could make your framework available, either free or for some money, for others to create their own series of examples/tutorials, then perhaps have a site for different things people want to create/publish, kind of crowdsourcing snippet-based language teaching.
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