With all the buzz of educational gaming it feels like everyone is on this bandwagon. While I’m excited to see this, I can’t help but feel insecure about my own game making skills. Truth is I’ve never made a game. I’ve witnessed two college level game developing classes as an observer but I didn’t get to practice the curriculum being taught. I walked away from these experiences feeling like the office assistant who couldn’t figure out how to use the copy machine. Boo for that. But, wait. I recently came across an interesting article talking about Kodu. Kodu is a Microsoft baby that was released on June 30th 2009 for game development (for PCs and Xbox 360) that uses the concepts of game design and visual programming language. Did I mention that Kodu is a free programming language for children? Well, it's not only free but it has a community on Planet Kodu to help support users of Kodu by providing tutorials, challenges, sample games and much more. This community not only provides an opportunity for you to connect but to also contribute.
While I don't expect Kodu to be the solution for the coding challenged, it is a nice alternative to start including more people in the gaming development world, children and late gaming bloomers alike.
P.S. While I continue to search for more examples of this type of programming language, I will include my findings below.
Here are the first two:
* LittleBigPlanet
* Game Maker
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Project DIRECT Travel Guide- Part Two: NASA CoLab region
On Friday March 11th 2011, Peggy and I attended and presented at the Virtual World Symposium in Portland. We were excited to learn about a few new destinations for our Project DIRECT travel guide. For example, during our panel "Virtual Universe Geekfest MMXI", we observed a presentation about the Neil A. Armstrong Library & Archives located on NASA's CoLab region in Second Life. This space is sure to impress and engage people of all ages. Take a look at what we highlight in this week's Project DIRECT travel guide. To teleport to this location click here.
Monday, March 7, 2011
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