Julio Santos

I’ve been looking for a programming language that would get a kid interested in programming. So far I haven’t had much success. The requirements I got were:

1- Want to write programs that are fun (games for example)
2- Should be easy to learn

And I’ve added

3- It looks like “real” languages (such as C or JavaScript)

I had considered Scheme, and though it’s easy to get started, I don’t think I would be able to teach game programming with it.

My next guess was Flash and ActionScript, but it seemed harder to get started with.

Eventually I came across “Kid’s Programming Language”, or KPL and I think I found a winner. It’s fun, lots of fun even (requirement #1). I like the speed at which I can start seeing results on the screen. I’m enjoying the instant gratification aspect. It comes with nice documentation and there aren’t many APIs (requirement #2).

And it looks like Visual Basic, so it’s not too foreign (requirement #3).

In an hour or so, I had my first racquetball game prototype. It’s fairly simple at the moment, just serve then bounce the ball off the wall. It’s just like in real life when I’m waiting for my partner to show up. It should be easy enough to add a scoring board and add another paddle so I can play with somebody else. Though I would have to process keys instead of mouse events then. It would also be neat if I could send and receive events over the net, but I’m happy with the language as it is.

If I ever finish the game I’ll post the code here. Meanwhile here’s a code snippet:

More about KPL here. Check it out, it comes with lots of fun games and the source code to get you started.