436: 20 GOTO 10

Chris Svec joined us to talk about kids programming and how well the Joel Test has held up.

Svec’s son (“The Kid”) developed an interest in programming by playing games. Most of his programming desires are around building games of his own. 

Any time we talk about kids and programming, Scratch comes up. It really is that neat and is The Kid approved. Some resources to get you started (actually, getting started is easy, you may want a book to do more than the basics):

• The Everything Kids' Scratch Coding Book: Learn to Code and Create Your Own Cool Games! by Jason Rukman 

• Scratch 3 Programming Playground: Learn to Program by Making Cool Games by Al Sweigart (hey, we know that guy!)

• griffpatch on YouTube 

Digipen.edu had two courses The Kid (and Svec) took. Both are free on YouTube:

• Introduction to Game Design Lessons

• DigiPen Basic Game Development Series

Finally, in a shockingly unrelated twist, we talked about the Joel Test for determining the health of a software development organization. No determination was made on how good The Kid finds his current position.

Transcript