Programming for You & Me

After years of wondering how to learn programming in an easy, fun and exciting way, I finally found some kind of a solution. The traditional way of learning programming is to go through the basic syntax and using the print function to output some result in the console window. If you want to get some graphical result, it may required a intermediate level, which would take time before a beginner could reach that level.

For me, I like to have some visual feedback with colours and figures, which I found is more fun than just “bits and bytes” on the screen. I think it would be more fun and easier to keep the motivation to learn programming if we could get something with visual impression, especially if we want to motivate non-programmer to start learning programming.

Please read my previous posts (Asteroid with GameMaker and Stencyl) for the motivation for finding a way for teaching programming.

Now, after some time of searching for answers, I think I have found a way. I think the tool named Stencyl would be suitable for this purpose. It’s tool where you can create games without coding, you’ll do programming by drag og drop of visual code blocks. This would make it easier for beginner to use, instead of learning and remembering the basic syntaxes.

Now the tool was decided, the next step was to find a way how to learn programming with the tool and what to make. I first created the game Asteroid but found out that this would be difficult and overwhelming at a beginner stage. After some time I created a new game, Tic Tac Toe, which was more easier to create, and I think this would be suitable for a beginner to start with.

The final step was to find a platform for teaching this subject. After some considerations, the YouTube platform was chosen, because the audience could access to the platform very easy.

After months of recording, editing, testing, making scripts, I finally come to a milestone in the project where I can launch the YouTube channel. In addition to this I want to create a community where the audience could share their work, knowledge and getting help. I decided to create a Facebook group for this purpose.

At the moment the channel is targeting the Norwegian audience. Later on I will make this channel available in English as well.