Rapid “digital” Game Creation helps kids

I forgot if I found this through RSS or Twitter, but here it is:

Rapid digital game creation for broadening participation in computing and fostering crucial thinking skills
Nikunj Dalal, Parth Dalal, Subhash Kak, Pavlo Antonenko, Susan Stansberry
International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing 2009 – Vol. 1, No.2 pp. 123 – 137
10.1504/IJSHC.2009.031002

I haven’t been able to get to the article as the library system is having issues right now, but according to the abstract and the lay articles that it’s generated, the use of non code based creation systems is a good thing for kids of all ages. This seems to be a no brainer, but thankfully there is now research to back it up. If you give people access to generate content in an media that they are comfortable with, you are more than likely to see good things come about. The important thing here is that the researchers have removed that complicated UI layer (like I was talking about in the last post) and have allowed the creators to work in an environment that more closely resembles the finished product.

I was thinking over the weekend about photography and how previously, you almost needed to be a chemist to get the most out of your images and thinking about how removed that was from the actual act of photography and how “digital” has changed that. Now someone takes a shot and can use it immediately and often with the same device that created the image, no black box required. Systems like the Rapid Dev environment would seem to do the same thing. People build in an environment that mimics the environment that they are going to experience when the project is finished effectively this research tells me that maintaining the “vocabulary” certainly helps when you are trying to get people to explore. If all you are wanting to get out of a game that you create is move A from 1.1 to 1.2 and have it explode, you don’t need to worry about the physics of collision detection and optimizing the math behind the path finding. Just like when you snap a picture, you want to be able to take it and share it quickly – you don’t want to deal with fstop and the rest – after all, the camera likely has hidden that from you. If however, your camera tells you all that, you have a vocabulary that then makes sense when you use tools that can then go and manipulate those settings.