I've had fun teaching kids to program for the Playdate, both with their top-down RPG toolkit, and their Lua developer environment as an intermediate level exercise. I find they're really motivated on this platform for a few reasons:
– The fact that they publish their games onto a polished handheld, rather than a toy environment;
– The fact that the Playdate has robust developer environments (incl. simulator)
– The fact that they learn Lua, which they know is a pretty transferrable skill in gamedev;
It also provides a nice environment for kids to start learning graphics techniques and work at the event loop level, if that interests them too.
The downside is that you have to shell out for a Playdate, but at least not the dev environment!
– The fact that they publish their games onto a polished handheld, rather than a toy environment;
– The fact that the Playdate has robust developer environments (incl. simulator)
– The fact that they learn Lua, which they know is a pretty transferrable skill in gamedev;
It also provides a nice environment for kids to start learning graphics techniques and work at the event loop level, if that interests them too.
The downside is that you have to shell out for a Playdate, but at least not the dev environment!