I was thinking about getting the kids interested into programming. So I looked around for some easy things that they could play with during the summer. They are very much into games as young as they are (9&5), so they would be thrilled if they could program their own game. As programming language, I still think “real man program with C/C++”, but scripting language (Ruby, Python, etc) seem to be much easier start for them without encounter much of the steep learning curve as well as the frustration.
That’s how I found this website called KidsRuby.com. The intent of the project is very good: they build an easy-to-understand GUI for kids to type in their code and hit “Run” and the Ruby code runs with the output shown in the right side window. They also tried to put together some tutorial/lessons to get the kids started.
However, the default tutorial “Make games with Gosu” doesn’t seem polished at all. The code is partly running so I have to fix some of the code to get a running version. You could download my code here.
It was really fun to see the kids excited about their own game running!