Thursday, July 5, 2012

Gaming JavaScript for Girls and Boys

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My next book is going to be a instructional guide for kids lovingly entitled Gaming Javascript for Girls and Boys.

tl;dr

  • Aimed at kids—specifically girls
  • Short game examples, followed by limited topic discussions
  • Will use Gladius from Mozilla
  • Follow along daily in this blog or join the mailing list
  • Help support this effort and get access to the GitHub repo

Why?

I love programming.

I love the act of programming. I love learning new tools, techniques and technologies. I quite enjoy sharing the learning (I have now blogged about it for 437 days straight). But I have yet to share that love with my three kids.

I made an aborted effort at teaching my kids to program via games two summers ago. In the end I got bogged down in writing what was effectively a gaming engine. Determined not to repeat that mistake, this time around, I intend to make use of some of the gaming engines available of the web, Gladius in particular.

When I was a kid, I learned to code Basic on the Commodore 64 by copying games. I remember some of it being really hard to figure out—it was just code, no documentation or description. My hope is to replicate that experience for my kids, but with a little help along the way.

Join me as I blog about this every day for 3+ months straight. At the end of July, an alpha version of the book will be available to purchase at a discounted rate. At the end of August, the beta will arrive. The first edition will be available at the end of September. Want more? Sign-up for the mailing list or purchase access to the book's GitHub repository.

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