How To Get a Game-Obsessed Teenager Into Coding? 704
looseBits writes "I have a friend whose 14-year-old son spends all his time gaming, like any normal teenager. However, my friend would like to find a more productive interest for him and asked me how to get him into coding. When I started coding, it was on the Apple II, and one could quickly write code that was almost as interesting as commercially available software. Now, times have changed and it would probably take years of study if starting from scratch to write something anyone would find mildly interesting. Does anyone have experience in getting their children into programming? How did you keep them interested if the only thing they can do after a week is make the computer count to 10 and dump it on the screen?"
Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:3, Insightful)
Get them started on the classics.
You don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Coding isn't something someone else chooses for you, it's something you choose for himself. And it has NOTHING to do with him being a gamer. Relating "He likes to game" with "He will like to code games" is no less absurd than relating "He likes to game" with "He will like to be an electrician." Gaming and coding are two completely different things, only tangentially related by the thinnest of connections. At the very most, you might tell him that there is code behind his game. But if he is 14 and doesn't know that, he's probably too stupid to ever be a coder anyway (well, he might still be qualified to code for EA).
My advice? Politely tell your friend to ask his son what *HE* wants to do with his life. If the kid's answer is something reasonable (i.e. not "rap star," "sports legend," or "professional gamer"), then your friend should help the kid explore *that* profession, and not just assume that he's destined to be a programmer just because he likes to game. Programming is not the kind of thing you get into because some putz friend of your father's goads you into it.
Ironically, when I got into coding, my parents tried to goad me *OUT* of it (because I would code for hours at a time and they wanted me to at least go outside). Now that is how you know you're meant to do something!
Mods (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Or be qualified to run Activision?
But yeah, like OP says, you can't expect him to want to code just because he loves to game. Some of the best advice ever that I hope every parent/parent-to-be out there takes from the comment would be
It took my parents years of coming around to this - they tried getting me into sports and music (I do love music, just not what I wanted to be doing back then) before finally realizing that I wanted to work with computers, both in hardware and software, and that their best bet was to support me so that I could grow up to do something I love, not something that they wanted me to do or hoped I would do. It's fine and dandy to explore different interests with your kids, but if you don't consider what THEY want then you're just being a jackass, no matter how good your intentions are.
Re:Give him a really crappy computer..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you considered Crysis?
Re:You don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Coding isn't something someone else chooses for you, it's something you choose for himself.
I wholheartedly agree. I've been coding for ten years now, and all my experience tells me it's a calling. Either you want to and you'll find a way, otherwise you'll never "see the light".
I've worked with coders who should never have been coders. They had the mechanical ability to produce syntax, but not the creative spart to take it to the level of art.
Re:You don't (Score:2, Insightful)
Mobile Programming (Score:2, Insightful)
Your friend needs to man up (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell your friend to man up and be a father. My son and I are building a custom case for a file server for the house, I have no art skillz but he does. Keeps his appetite for tech up without him doing the brain drain in front of the tube.
FYI - normal teenagers do not spend all their time gaming
Game Modding (Score:5, Insightful)
Get him into game modding. If the kid plays WoW, the modding community is great, and it was the only thing that made me endure the game for a year. WoW uses LUA, which is a great and easy to use language, couple with XML for interfaces and data transfer.
Another option is creating mods and maps for Civilization IV. With Civ V coming this year, with even better modding potential, this is really worth a shot. Otherwise, try to check what is writable for whatever the kid is playing. Coupling the gaming experience with the more "productive" time codding, is his better shot.
Lego Mindstorm (Score:3, Insightful)
Get him one. See if you can find local clubs where they have competitions involving mindstorm and what you can do with them.
If you can invoke the inner gamer's competitiveness in him while taking up mindstorm challenge, you have introduced him to first steps of coding. Next wipe mindstorms firmware off it and load the java firmware.
You do not choose software. Software chooses you. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please, don't do it . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Calm down already, it's a 14-year-old. Give him a chance to try it at least.
Re:How do you get a kid to play football? (Score:3, Insightful)
I found the social alienation and awkwardness of adolescence was a huge factor for me, but that might be a bit old-skool. :-P
Re:Please, don't do it . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Until I went to college, I was "self-taught" in programming. I learned a lot of cool, new things in college, and I learned a heck of a lot more when I started producing code for money. I have the "knack" for it. But you know what? When I look back at code I wrote even a few years ago, it sucked.
Why?
For one: programming is an art, and well, practice makes perfect. That said, everyone sucks when they start.
But the other one, and Joel Spolsky says this rather concisely: it's easier to write code than to read it.
Discouraging people from becoming programmers because you don't want to fix their bugs is just about the lamest argument I've ever heard. Bugs happen, man. If we had a magic formula for writing software, guess what? We'd write software to write software. No one gets it right.
Re:You don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and no. Some decisions (what to eat) children just aren't mature enough to make. Other skill sets (language) are easiest learned at a young age, and pretty universally useful (if only to test out of foreign language classes later in life to take something else in their stead). Or things like some sport/exercise to build good habits that hopefully last a lifetime.
But those should be balanced by helping, nay encouraging, the child to do something he enjoys. The best habit is to teach them to pursue their interests, and the best skillset is learning how to learn.
After a week, if you need to do more... you can't. (Score:2, Insightful)
If he's been doing it for a week, and he's destined to be a coder, there's nothing you an do now to stop him.
OTOH, if he isn't going to pursue it and take it to the next level himself, he'll never be a coder. The most important point about good programmers is that they must be able to solve their own problems (that is, at its heart, what the job is), they have to be able to teach themselves, and they must do this continually for the rest of the their lives, or at least as long as they're still coding. If they don't have the ability and the drive to teach themselves, they will never be a good coder and it's a very bad idea to try to force them into it.
Re:Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
I think anyone who spends a lot of time on games past about 16 years needs some help growing up. The need to play so much indicates (to me) that they don't have enough interesting, more important things to think about.
I think you may want to check the main target demographics for every $300+ console since the PS1.
Also, "important" is subjective. Unless you're the president, the pope, or a nobel prize winning physicist, chances are the stuff you're working on that you think is "important" is probably not worth a hill of beans to the rest of humanity at large.
Re:Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
If he's the type to play games, nothing can compete with the fun of a video game. You don't know what you're up against. People literally, literally, abandon their lives for World of Warcraft. Life isn't very fun you know, especially for a teenager (treated like second-class citizens, zero assets and completely dependent on parents, most available jobs border on psychologically unendurable, plus all the stresses of trying to figure out what the world is all about etc).
Parenting (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of being a parent and raising your child is making use of available resources, including discussion forums, to get information about your child's situations and possible ways of dealing with them.
Borland C++ Builder (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a really easy way to lower the bar and you could get some simple UI-based games up & going with a minimal amount of (non-generated) code.
It's way too late. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's way too late.
The time to get someone interested in coding was when it was possible for them to sit down with a computer and a copy of Compute! magazine, type in a game program source code, and then play the resulting game.
Without the tie in between coding (work) and the reward (gaming), the coding doesn't become fun, unless you are already bent in that direction.
That level of game, where you are pushing 8 bit pixels around, is, frankly, no longer interesting. At the time, however, it was state-of-the-art, and you could get your head around it easily because it didn't require a lot of abstract complexity to modify the programs. In fact, you usually typo'ed typing in the program, and it didn't do what you expected, so you learned to compare the source with what you had put in the machine, and got some debugging skills out of it and a working game as the reward. Constant exposure to this type of thing, and you can't help but absorb some of the syntax and code flow understanding necessary to take the next step and make the bad buy look different than they way the original programmer intended. Or change the game logic to the point that the game play is different, or you're getting huge scores compared to your friends because you did the right button/joystick sequence early in the game and activated the "cheat mode" you built into it.
Those days are pretty much gone. There is a very large divide between a small amount of ability and an interesting result, because the state-of-the-art has moved on, and there's now a big divide.
I find it really ironic that the most valuable programmers you can hire these days pretty much come from places where their idea of interesting is one generation back because the hardware and software they had to play with is one generation back, and they have a decade difference between our "old school" and theirs.
-- Terry
Re:You don't (Score:2, Insightful)
Coding isn't something someone else chooses for you, it's something you choose for himself....Politely tell your friend to ask his son what *HE* wants to do with his life.
Dude, relax. They were talking about getting the kid started, not determining his life path. Programming is a perfectly valid hobby, and if he likes it, maybe he'll choose it as a profession, and if not, well at least he tried it and found that out instead of having elrous0 determine for him that he wouldn't be into it because he wasn't already into it.
And it has NOTHING to do with him being a gamer.
Funny, 'cuz when I started it had EVERYTHING to do with me being a gamer. My mom saw me playing Super Mario Brothers when I was 8 and asked if I'd like to learn to make my own games. Then when I was 9 she handed me her accumulated programming books (back then it was normal when you bought a computer for the manual to cover the version of BASIC included with that computer). When I started out programming my only interest was in making games, based on my interest in gaming, and I didn't come to appreciate algorithms, data structures, and elegantly solving problems until years later.
Relating "He likes to game" with "He will like to code games" is no less absurd than relating "He likes to game" with "He will like to be an electrician."
Yeah, and that's about as absurd as, "He likes horses" being related to "He will like to be a veterinarian." Of course being into electronic devices is a partial predictor for being interested in how said devices work. Come back to us when someone asks slashdot how to get a kid to study quantum physics because he's into pro wrestling. Of course it would be silly if someone considered being into gaming to be a 100% predictor of enjoying programming, but I don't think OP was making that judgment...merely that it might be fruitful to introduce programming because it might be something the kid ends up enjoying. Which is a perfectly fair supposition, because the two are actually quite related.
What is "important", anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think anyone who spends a lot of time on games past about 16 years needs some help growing up. The need to play so much indicates (to me) that they don't have enough interesting, more important things to think about.
I think you may want to check the main target demographics for every $300+ console since the PS1.
Also, "important" is subjective. Unless you're the president, the pope, or a nobel prize winning physicist, chances are the stuff you're working on that you think is "important" is probably not worth a hill of beans to the rest of humanity at large.
It's a subjective argument, of course - but being a parent means trying to guide a child to make decisions that will give him or her a good, rewarding life.
Personally, I think I wasted far too much time in the 90's watching TV and playing games. I don't blame anyone for the decisions I made, but it really makes me think about how I want to approach the whole thing when I have kids. I love playing games, and I want to build an arcade machine and play more games. But I also recognize that games are killing my free time, even standing in the way of other things I want to do. For that reason, frogzilla's perspective resonates with me. As much as I like gaming I feel like it's unhealthy to get drawn into it too much. I don't want that for my kids.
As for "important" - I build models, and my wife is an artist. Neither pursuit is "important to the world at large" - and sometimes I wonder if what I do isn't even sufficiently personally rewarding. But I believe it's important to develop active interests as opposed to passive interests. Enjoying work that others have made is fun but I believe it's important to learn to make your own contributions as well. Otherwise, you're just a slave of sorts - hanging forever on that next episode, the next playoff, or the next new release. Making things yourself is more challenging - and probably more expensive - but the potential rewards are greater as well.
Why coding? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because he plays on a computer doesn't mean he has any sort of knack for programming.
Better than coding might be buying him an X-acto set, some Duco Cement, some Testers paints, and some various model kits - a rocket, plane, boat, car, etc. Mix it up and get him a four-channel R/C setup and let him tear some s#!t up!
Building stuff you can play with is immensely rewarding and not confined to coding games (or other programs).
Hell, even something really useful like a carpentry class. My school system had them starting in 8th grade.
Re:Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, consider that any given teenager might not be interesting in programming (SHOCKER!) and prefers to draw. This can pretty easily lead into free 3D modeling tools like DAZ Studio, where you can make a fair bit of change just being good at crafting and skinning objects. (Don't worry about buying a copy of Photoshop, the kid'll take care of that. ;) Then there's game modding, level design, etc. etc. If an indie game catches his/her eye, they are off to the races.
I grew up on Apple BASIC, QuickBASIC, DOS Batch, Turbo ASM/Pascal/C, and finally decided there wasn't any satisfaction for me in building applications, only using them. Especially after watching the coding lifestyle of friends and family in the field. So I became an expert in that. Now I'm a professional graphic and web designer, and get to hire programmers to do the mathy stuff I don't wanna. :)
Re:Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
NOOOOOOOOOOOO! "GOTO" is EEEEEEVILLLLLLLLLL!
Just the opposite. Far more kids were interested in science and programming back in the days when the chemistry set could burn or blow your fingers off, and the use of unprotected GOTO's, peeks, poke, and global variables could crash your computer a zillion different ways. Choosing safety has taken all the fun out of play.
Teach the kid how to program in BASIC. Bill Gates and Woz can be his role models. What teenage kid has heard of or wants to be Djiskstra?
Re:Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
I think anyone who spends a lot of time on games past about 16 years needs some help growing up.
Which, presumably, would not be true of people who spend their time reading books, watching films, playing golf, etc..
The old "my leisure activity is superior to your leisure activity" nonsense, eh?
The need to play so much indicates (to me) that they don't have enough interesting, more important things to think about.
Oh. So is this more the "leisure activities are a complete waste of time" variety of nonsense?
Re:Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:1, Insightful)
Y'know, a lot of people have hobbies that other people might not enjoy. In general, people don't choose hobbies because they appeal to other people, they choose them because they like them. WoW may look like a chore to you, but other people think it's fun. Some people make a hobby of carpentry. I don't enjoy carpentry. That doesn't mean that I think everyone who does carpentry as a hobby lives a life devoid of fun or interest. Why the assumption that WoW players must live dull, defective lives to enjoy their hobby?
Re:Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:3, Insightful)
I think every person that tells others they need to grow up, can use some growing up themselves. ;)
Think about that one for a while; you'll probably get it by the time you've grown up
Re:You don't (Score:3, Insightful)
Does the kid even WANT to program? (Score:3, Insightful)
I enjoy my regular trips to the toilet thoroughly. Every time I feel relieved afterwards and I tend to go several times each day.
Doesn't mean I want to install toilets for a living.
Just because the kid wants to play games doesn't mean he wants to make them.
Quite honestly, if the kid wouldn't get excited about his first ever computer program counting to 10 and dumping it on screen, then perhaps he's not the type.
Re:Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod parent up. Not everyone has the mindset for programming.
Having said that - if you can't build your own engine - maybe get him started on modding?
Re:Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, so I see your post above, talking about how you'd rather be a 'maker' than a 'consumer'. And that's fine. Obviously, you can't be a maker all the time. You probably live in a house that someone else built out of materials that someone else produced using machinery that someone else made... etc. And that's fine. Most of us don't make everything we have from basic principles. Relatively few people probably make anything at all, outside of the requirements of their job. But it's not a bad goal to have, to be creative and productive in your free time.
What I take issue with, though, is saying that reading a fiction book is 'just' entertainment. Is there nothing we can learn from fiction? I studied creative writing as an undergraduate student; required to be a good writer is to be a good reader. In that sense, as I consume fiction, I'm strengthening my own base of experience for composition. And I'm not a writer who thinks that genre fiction is necessarily all rubbish. I certainly think we can learn from, say, a Dan Brown book, even though he doesn't have the canonical blessing of Dickens or Thoreau or Homer, or whoever. It doesn't mean we should emulate him, but any experience is an opportunity to learn.
And that's really my point: it's not about whether or not fiction is a frivolous use of time, it's that there are a lot of things out there that people scoff at as being 'just' entertainment, but all of these things have something to teach us. Consuming and experiencing the works of others, even in areas that we don't traditionally think of as high art, are vital parts of the creative process.
Would any of us remember Warhol if not for his inspiration by such otherwise utterly mundane things as Campbell's Soup? Where would Lichtenstein have been without comic books, which are, even today, derided as a waste of time?
Entertainment is only 'just' entertainment if you learn nothing from it and refuse to be creative, yourself. Like it or not, video games and fiction are a large part of our culture. Our immersion in this culture informs our creative choices. If we spend too much of our time consuming, it interferes with our own expressions of creativity, and that's a problem. But I don't think you should feel guilty for spending an afternoon at a book, as long as you possess the analytical ability to take something from the experience. And if you don't have that ability, you probably wouldn't feel guilty about it, anyway.
Re:What is "important", anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know....I think once you start being concerned with "So much time wasted" when you were younger, you may be taking yourself too seriously (unless you seriously had a gaming/other problem). In my high school/college years I spent a lot of time playing video games, playing D&D/strategy board games, playing basketball, fishing, and getting fucking wasted. None of those activities are really helping me succeed in life, but I ENJOYED them.
I guess if you intend to be the worlds greatest coder/golfer/singer/whatever you need to start early and spend an inordinate amount of time focused on your goal. The rest of us who just want to enjoy life and work at a halfway decent job are going to have time to fritter away. If I had spent my youth simply preparing for adulthood I would be a lot more disappointed in myself.
Re:Same way you get your kids interested in gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
As for teaching yourself to program as a teenager, that's the one common aspect among all the people I know who are truly good, 'natural' programmers. We all taught ourselves. And that's what I'd say to TFA: Don't try to 'make him interested', let him develop his own interest. Don't stress if he's not writing FPS games at 12. The absolute best way to make anyone hate ANYTHING is to nag them into doing it.
one word: pr0n (Score:3, Insightful)
You really think he spends all those hours in his room gaming?