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Show HN: Building a Game with a 6-Year-Old

by johnpolacek on 11/29/14, 6:09 PM with 23 comments

• by Sakes on 11/29/14, 8:59 PM

  This is awesome. I am hoping to start teaching my kid programming at age 5. I've been working with him on his reading since he was around 2. He is 4 now. He reads pretty well, but amazingly well for a 4 year old. We are on level 2/3 books at the moment.

  I was hoping to have taught him basic math skills by now. But unfortunately I have not had any success with that. He doesn't understand subtraction yet, and his addition still consists mostly of counting.

  I didn't want to push him to hard, because it is more important for me to instill in him a love of learning rather than teach him specifically how to read, or his multiplication tables. As a result we haven't progressed as quickly as I had hoped, but I couldn't be more proud of him.

  The trick I use to get him to read is "no video games until reading is done". There are plenty of days where he opts to not read and not play video games. And there are plenty of days where he reminds me he can't play until he reads.

• by johnpolacek on 11/29/14, 8:58 PM

  Phaser is awesome. If your kid has an idea for a game, odds are there is already a decent example or tutorial out there to get you started. http://phaser.io

• by robjcowell on 11/30/14, 9:16 AM

  Been doing a game with my (now) 5 year old daughter for the last year. Also uses her own hand drawn artwork, which in itself makes for interesting challenges (mostly collision detection for non tiled sprites) but she's very much the creative director to my lead developer. She loves that we can but is less interested in the how at this age

• by kamikazi on 11/29/14, 7:10 PM

  very cool! I'll try this with my 4.5 year old - he's just about getting a hang of an internet as an 'abstract invisible something' - that like electricity is out there; that it can be turned on and off. And when it's on he's able to see pictures of lion tiger and other animals on our tablet. I might just start by replacing car gif with a lion. Lion on wheels - should be fun heh! :D

• by mosselman on 11/30/14, 3:43 PM

  Cool! I used to build Lego with my dad, but doing things with computers was mostly by myself. It would be really fun to just build what a child wants, without diluting the creativity with adult 'thinking'.

• by sogen on 11/30/14, 3:57 AM

  I'd recommend Construct2, Friendly, gentle learning curve

• by joshdance on 12/1/14, 4:50 PM

  Super cool. I hope to do this kind of thing with my kids one day. Thanks for sharing it.