It's simple enough that after an afternoon of basic instruction, my 5 year old managed to create this entirely on her own while I was cooking dinner - http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/hobart/2372941 (try pressing various keys - I know that "g", space, "8", "m", up arrow and the green flag all do something, but there may be more in there as well).
Congratulations, that's excellent! I'll have to show this to my daughter. She wants to make her own Hello Kitty game since she's been watching her older brother (8) making games on Scratch :) Its an excellent platform for learning the basics of programming. I was worried that my son wouldn't have the patience to work with Scratch since he sees what's on Wii and XBox and that has set his expectation level. But fortunately he's become very excited by Scratch and can build games with very little or no guidance from me now, w00t!
Thanks. I was expecting my daughter to get bored quickly as well. But having watched her, it strikes me as a software version of Lego - you'll never create a toy/game as good as one you could buy in the shops, but the real fun is the fact that you can create pretty much anything your imagination can come up with.
That's amazing! I would have loved something like this when I was growing up. If you can do that simple games would be no problem, and who doesn't dream of making their own games.
It's absolutely brilliant for kids - and it seems to be avaialble on Linux, so should be runnable on Raspberry Pi - which could be great for the classroom. It's so easy to add new little bits of functionality and see them in action that she never got bored whilst I was showing her the basics - in fact it seems to be her new favourite app at the moment. I can't recommend it highly enough as a first step programming educational tool (the reason I was first looking at it was because my wife's a teacher and was looking at a good app to teach programming to 10 year olds).
It's certainly possible to write very simple games. The tutorial I gave my daughter was a (very clunky) Space Invaders clone, and I'm going to have a go at something a little more advanced tonight - I've got to make sure she doesn't start overtaking me...
The one place it seems to fall down a little is managing multiple identical sprites - I looked at a rather more professional-looking Space Invaders that someone else had written and it looks like they needed a separate sprite with full code behind it for every single alien, although it looks like BYOB may address some of this.
It's simple enough that after an afternoon of basic instruction, my 5 year old managed to create this entirely on her own while I was cooking dinner - http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/hobart/2372941 (try pressing various keys - I know that "g", space, "8", "m", up arrow and the green flag all do something, but there may be more in there as well).