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Comment by jampa | Hacker News Reader

Game modding

The first contact I had to actual programming was messing with Pawno scripts to make gameservers in San Andreas multiplayer when I was 12... Spent hours and hours programming with it. It started simple placing coordinates where the cars should spawn until I started to mess with more 'complicated' stuff like gates that open when player get near.

I would get some game that is popular among kids that age (minecraft?) and teach them to make simple modifications, if they like they will try to push themselfs to make harder and more complex stuff, the reward/work ratio is bigger than make a game from scratch on HTML, where there is a lot that needs to be done before getting to the "fun part".

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Games are a great way to get kids into computers and code.

Many of us who grew up around MS-DOS had to figure out ways to get around the 640kb base memory limitation and deal with conflicting IRQ ports. Did we want to do that? No, we just wanted to play Dune II. But through that, it got us tinkering with installing new programs, tinkering with configuration files, and eventually learning BASIC, putting together your own computer, etc.

Unless the kids are extremely mature and patient, the best way is to focus on an appealing end product. Don't present it as "oh, let's learn about boolean operators" today, as much as "hey, want to build a [something cool] together?"

And you know what? It may not stick; maybe they'd rather be outside, bake some cookies, or beat on some drums, and that's fine, too.

Doom modding was a challenge too, though more because the tools were immature. Now Duke3D changed that when it shipped with Build. Now I know teens who still use Build to experiment despite it being nearly as old as them.

Codakid (based in Scottsdale, Arizona) teaches kids how to code with Minecraft mods amongst other things.

Wasn't aware of them, signing up my daughter now. Thanks!

Also game hacking. I remember teaching myself VB to make flash game trainers. Would be interesting to find maybe some open-source HTML5/JS games and teach the kids to hack the JS to do what they want. With kids, it tends to help if you give them an existing foundation to build on or work around.

Can relate. Although I enjoyed doing things with websites my programming took on a noticeable uptick after I managed to find a way to automate (fancy for bot >_>) my crafting in FFXIV so I could game and go to the gym at the same time...

I first learned programming from game modding as well. I loved it.

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