comment section is quite critical/harsh? for no good reason?
I think this is an awesome project for them both. And it's totally understandable to use an LLM for the base project as it's a 'fun' thing from the read. it doesn't look like it's trying to compete with anything....
The kid can learn within an environment created by parent, so they can also collaborate on improving that environment, while the kid also has their own learning _within_ that environment.
This seems like a wonderfully geeky adventure to go on if ur kid enjoys it :D love it. hope it will spark some cool interactions between them and make some epic memories :)
Also, maybe people forget how it was like back in the day.
I am not _too_ old - pentium 1 was my first PC. I learned making games in PASCAL, QBASIC and later custom C implementations that came with like 'gamemaker ' CDs etc. this was all very complicated to learn at a young age... Had to get many books and things (no internet!) at the PC shop to try and get my head around it. Never quite did until much later in my life!
Sure things like Scratch exists, but this beauty of this one is that this one is _theirs_. Surely we can recognize the enjoyment that might bring to a parent and kids' lives? Learning is a bonus! Not everything is about being technically the best of the best -_- stop being Marines at everyhting. We're not at war with eachother over who writes the best code.
Good use of LLM technology to make a project in my mind. props!
Indeed teach kids today how to properly type into a textbox to create entire web and or mobile digital experiences. Teach them also how to type into a textbox to create songs, graphics, art, etc.
For us it's seems so uninspring because what we are used to is now the old way of digital creation/execution. It's a big change many aren't thrilled with including myself which I should because I can now create all my crazy ideas on my own without hiring back-end or iPhone developers as previously have done for my startups. Yet, i am unspired by this new way even when I used Codex to create a few of my ideas already (soon i will be starting my new healthcare career after 17 years in research/design & web dev).
I am all for change yet when the change makes your tech skills feel irrelevant as it opens the field to anyone who can type I do not see a rosy employment picture. I was use to being in a field where my knowledge/skills/experience were highly sought after and in demand. Now that doesn't exist anymore but it does in other in demand fields like blue collar workers and healthcare (at least for now).
i am anti llm for my own reasons but i dont expect others to be copies of me :-). its very silly to be negative to others or their works just because you have a different opinion.
Have been teaching coding to kids professionally for a while now. Ultimately what works is what the kid will engage in. Some kids bounce off of Scratch completely but then get totally hooked on text programming. I've been following what little has been published around teaching coding with AI, I'd say it's inconclusive at best which also tracks with my experience. We don't totally ignore it, since it is a standard development tool now, but if the environment is not tightly constrained it can be detrimental, it can quickly spit out a bunch of code that makes the student very overwhelmed.
Sometimes we will let them use AI to make a focused change to their project, like "make the character do a flip when he jumps", then they're getting a fairly controlled diff surrounded by a ton of context, which I think really does boost their coding "literacy". I'd rather my students be able to read code well than write a for loop from memory, so I've found it useful in that sense.
https://last-outpost.com was my first experience with MUDs, and it's still being developed today. I'll never forget the time we finally got AOL + winsock.dll to combine for a telnet session into it.
Now I'm teaching my son how to read on the same server.
I have a love/hate relationship with my memories of the MUD era. I loved exploring different worlds and interacting with some of the brilliant people who took the time to help teach and encourage others. I was a casual who would disappear for months at a time when doing real world things, but it was comforting to be able to come back a little community of people building fun things.
The couple MUD communities I participated in eventually collapsed under drama explosions from terminally online people. Some really manipulative and cruel stuff from people who would present themselves as noble community leaders, work themselves into positions of power, then grind down everyone in the out group until the rest of the community stopped playing.
I would log in to a couple of them once a year. It was the same small ingroup of people idling away. All the recent posts on the in-game message board were from the new people complaining, admonishing, or introducing more rules to tighten their grip on anyone who remained. Really sad to see the same pattern collapse multiple different communities in the same way.
I had a blast in the late 2000s joining dead MUDs and just wandering around. It was utterly bizarre, in a good way. It also felt somewhat shocking when someone else actually signed in.
This is extremely interesting to me. I also have an 8 year old daughter who inspired me to build tooling for kids to create their own games. However, what I've come up with is quite different than this.
The primary mechanism through which kids create their game worlds is taking photos of their own hand drawn artwork.
I found traditional game dev tooling was far too technical and verbose for my daughter to stay interested. Honestly, it's not just a matter of her losing interest due to the complexity. Frankly, I don't want her sitting in front of a screen that long. She's a kid and I want her doing typical kid stuff. She and her younger sisters play sports, draw, paint, perform magic shows, and sing and dance around the house like complete nutbags — and I love it!
So whilst what I've built is highly technical for me to maintain, I'm not trying to expose all that complexity to kids. At least, not yet. I'm mostly interested in fueling creativity and letting kids explore. That's not to say kids that want to dive deep can't — we offer visual coding experiences etc. The intent is kids gain access to new features through self directed exploration and play. If some kids stop at just play, that's OK. The primary game mechanics (drawing and building worlds) are still inherently creative.
Although my approach is different, there is a heap in this article I resonant with. The hacking mentality, and letting kids go beyond the artificial constraints in particular. There's still much of Breaka Club that I can improve on. I'm running a limited in-school pilot at present and that's already yielded some really interesting insights. I'm really keen to continue to see what others put out in this space. I think it's drastically underserved and there's plenty of room for multiple approaches.
A MUD got me into programming, just wanted to make one myself. I was too young then. Now that I’m “grown”, every five years I feel like the kids these days have so many tools to make it easier or at least more knowable.
Also, that ASCII art(or pixel art?) as the header looks serene. Any tips/rabbit holes on achieving that art style?
Looks like it's just dithered pixel art. The JS in the page isn't obfuscated, and I'm not an expert but it looks like the image is being dynamically generated, and then there's a bayer dithering with some extra random jitter
I've been teaching my 9 year old to code using Ruby, the best language to start with IMO: Clear, expressive English, object oriented is intuitive, and we're using Ruby2D to make simple terminal-based games. I prefer it to graphical-oriented languages like Scratch, as I think working with pure text and typing the commands out is a good experience.
I honestly think the child would be far better served with Scratch rather than some half-assed adventure writing language (having created several such languages myself).
Edit: To clarify, the languages I created were also half-assed - it's very difficult to create a good one.
I'd say Canon and Scratch are different tools with different purposes. Both are simple and interactive enough for children to love. The main difference I see is that Canon abstracts away a lot of the game state management logic and you get to focus on creating characters, items and having lots of fun. Scratch looks like it has a steeper learning curve and while it is a good introduction to programming, it gets pretty hard to navigate once project size increases. As someone who started programming with Scratch, I think that making a text adventure game like the ones Canon does in Scratch would be much more complicated and the end result wouldn't be half as nice.
I think the only thing that matters is whatever the kid finds appealing enough to do at all.
e.g. I started with Ruby on Rails. Not even Ruby. The feedback loop is what convinced me that I wanted to write software and then dive into the fundamentals.
Second this. Even the kid who later chose a programming career hated Scratch.
Also, it'd be far too low level in comparison to what the guy did - ultimately, this is a game engine. Proper comparison would maybe be against Inform 7.
What? The article even states there's only one use of AI. What are you talking about?
> Wish is the only AI feature in Canon, and it’s strictly limited to a single tutorial item per day. In a gameworld where everything else is explicitly written by humans for humans. And that alone was instantly polarizing.
So we can't enjoy driving a car unless we build it ourselves? Can't cook with knives we didn't forge? They made something together and used it to - by hand - create more, including the capability to extend what it created. From the kid's perspective, the coder not yet able, it's no different than if her dad created the language from scratch.
A bit sad to see the author "10xing" his passion project with LLMs. I ended up moving one of my older projects in a similar way and I feel gross about it now. As if I didn't even work on it originally. I may just hard reset the LLM commits off my tree entirely at this point.
I think this is an awesome project for them both. And it's totally understandable to use an LLM for the base project as it's a 'fun' thing from the read. it doesn't look like it's trying to compete with anything....
The kid can learn within an environment created by parent, so they can also collaborate on improving that environment, while the kid also has their own learning _within_ that environment.
This seems like a wonderfully geeky adventure to go on if ur kid enjoys it :D love it. hope it will spark some cool interactions between them and make some epic memories :)
Also, maybe people forget how it was like back in the day.
I am not _too_ old - pentium 1 was my first PC. I learned making games in PASCAL, QBASIC and later custom C implementations that came with like 'gamemaker ' CDs etc. this was all very complicated to learn at a young age... Had to get many books and things (no internet!) at the PC shop to try and get my head around it. Never quite did until much later in my life!
Sure things like Scratch exists, but this beauty of this one is that this one is _theirs_. Surely we can recognize the enjoyment that might bring to a parent and kids' lives? Learning is a bonus! Not everything is about being technically the best of the best -_- stop being Marines at everyhting. We're not at war with eachother over who writes the best code.
Good use of LLM technology to make a project in my mind. props!
For us it's seems so uninspring because what we are used to is now the old way of digital creation/execution. It's a big change many aren't thrilled with including myself which I should because I can now create all my crazy ideas on my own without hiring back-end or iPhone developers as previously have done for my startups. Yet, i am unspired by this new way even when I used Codex to create a few of my ideas already (soon i will be starting my new healthcare career after 17 years in research/design & web dev).
This is not a genie you can put back in a bottle.
As a start, why do you disagree and how would you further this discussion?
You'd be surprised what kids can make once you give them the basic building blocks: https://jump.academy/projects/fruit-drop
Sometimes we will let them use AI to make a focused change to their project, like "make the character do a flip when he jumps", then they're getting a fairly controlled diff surrounded by a ton of context, which I think really does boost their coding "literacy". I'd rather my students be able to read code well than write a for loop from memory, so I've found it useful in that sense.
Now I'm teaching my son how to read on the same server.
There's a lot of fun "lego-style" creativity to be had in designing rooms, mobs and coming up with grand area designs.
Cool idea.
The couple MUD communities I participated in eventually collapsed under drama explosions from terminally online people. Some really manipulative and cruel stuff from people who would present themselves as noble community leaders, work themselves into positions of power, then grind down everyone in the out group until the rest of the community stopped playing.
I would log in to a couple of them once a year. It was the same small ingroup of people idling away. All the recent posts on the in-game message board were from the new people complaining, admonishing, or introducing more rules to tighten their grip on anyone who remained. Really sad to see the same pattern collapse multiple different communities in the same way.
Curious if that’s coincidence or if players of UO brought that over most likely from MUDs.
https://gatewaymud.org/
https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids
The primary mechanism through which kids create their game worlds is taking photos of their own hand drawn artwork.
I found traditional game dev tooling was far too technical and verbose for my daughter to stay interested. Honestly, it's not just a matter of her losing interest due to the complexity. Frankly, I don't want her sitting in front of a screen that long. She's a kid and I want her doing typical kid stuff. She and her younger sisters play sports, draw, paint, perform magic shows, and sing and dance around the house like complete nutbags — and I love it!
So whilst what I've built is highly technical for me to maintain, I'm not trying to expose all that complexity to kids. At least, not yet. I'm mostly interested in fueling creativity and letting kids explore. That's not to say kids that want to dive deep can't — we offer visual coding experiences etc. The intent is kids gain access to new features through self directed exploration and play. If some kids stop at just play, that's OK. The primary game mechanics (drawing and building worlds) are still inherently creative.
Although my approach is different, there is a heap in this article I resonant with. The hacking mentality, and letting kids go beyond the artificial constraints in particular. There's still much of Breaka Club that I can improve on. I'm running a limited in-school pilot at present and that's already yielded some really interesting insights. I'm really keen to continue to see what others put out in this space. I think it's drastically underserved and there's plenty of room for multiple approaches.
Also, that ASCII art(or pixel art?) as the header looks serene. Any tips/rabbit holes on achieving that art style?
Edit: To clarify, the languages I created were also half-assed - it's very difficult to create a good one.
e.g. I started with Ruby on Rails. Not even Ruby. The feedback loop is what convinced me that I wanted to write software and then dive into the fundamentals.
Also, it'd be far too low level in comparison to what the guy did - ultimately, this is a game engine. Proper comparison would maybe be against Inform 7.
It makes zero sense to start people off in an actually bad programming environment.
Try Snap! Instead of Scratch.
> Wish is the only AI feature in Canon, and it’s strictly limited to a single tutorial item per day. In a gameworld where everything else is explicitly written by humans for humans. And that alone was instantly polarizing.
Hopefully he doesn't come to regret it either.