I saw many games trying to teach programming, but never heard of any of them gaining significant popularity. I wonder why?
I guess "play games instead of reading books" idea attracts audience with low motivation?
I guess "play games instead of reading books" idea attracts audience with low motivation?
I've definitely heard of some games that teach programming skills getting popular. For example, https://flexboxfroggy.com/ http://www.flexboxdefense.com/ for teaching css layout.
https://www.freecodecamp.org/ isn't marketed as a game, but absolutely feels like one when you are going through the program.
https://www.hackthebox.com/ is another great example.
As to reading books, I used a lot of resources to become a programmer, but books weren't one of them. I'd wager hardly anybody uses books today.
In seriousness though why do you think any educational game would ever gain popularity anywhere close to popular video games.And what the popularity of the material even have to do with the motivation of its consumers???
There's a ton of resources for this area now though, I'm not sure I can point to any one thing as a standard.
This seems a little uncharitable in its premise to me. I've never had all that much success learning from programming books, and the success I've had seemed to happen mostly when I would take the examples and run them and pull them apart and break them and fix them (etc, etc, etc).
From the other side, well designed games are remarkable in their ability to teach concepts to a player (even if, in the general case, they're not concepts with applicability outside the game).
It seems obvious to me that some kind of interactivity is really helpful in learning. Not too much of a stretch from there to guess that the best form of programming education might be some kind of game/book hybrid.
Factorio is often given as an example of managing complexity, as another response said. TIS-100 has the aesthetics of assembly programming but the substance is actually a game that teaches hardware parallelism. Even something as simple as having students act out the 'dining philosophers' problem can be thought of as a game.
But yeah, just one data point in millions who don't use games.
There are quite a few popular ones. Bitburner encouraged this JS hater (me) to give it a try.
* CodeCombat is gamified programming lessons and seems to be reasonably popular with kids.
* Human Resource Machine teaches assembly language programming and was popular -- it even got a sequel, Seven Billion Humans.
* Robot Turtles was a kickstarted code-teaching board game that became popular enough to become a ThinkFun staple (you can tell because of how cheap it is).