alt Hacker NewsWhen I give short talks at schools about game dev I try to make it super clear that we are all born game designers. We all make up games as children and a large part of that is story telling.
Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing. Teachers know how to nurture that against the pressure of society crushing it.
It was python+pygame that got one of my kids to learn to program and minecraft modding that got another to learn. Neither code now but that wasn't the point.
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A few years ago I took a class of middle schoolers through a simple game dev course and rarely have I seen a group of kids so motivated. Using microStudio[1] they built the story, art, music, gameplay, and levels - I only helped a bit with the code. They kept asking about it long afterwards, so I eventually threw it up on a static site: http://uprag.quest (warning - flashy jump scares)
"Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing."
Hm. My teachers rather stopped me from looking outside the window to see faces in the clouds and placed me on a seat far away from any window so I could fully focus on the less interesting topics at hand, that society demands that I know. (Yet when I was succesfully done with all that schools, I found that I learned very little of practical value from my higher education anyway)