GameMaker - Asteroid

During fall of 2016 I wanted to find a tool which could be used for learning kids and youths how to do programming and making games. Sometimes I feel it could be difficult, and some degree boring, to go through all the basic of programming, before you could actually creating something fun. I like to have some visual feedback with colours and figures, which is more fun than just 'bits and bytes' on the screen. I also believe that it would be more effective to learn by doing. And for non-programmer, mostly kids and youths, by creating something with visual impression would make the learning process fun and easier to keep the motivation. The first priority is to learn how to create games, then learning the basic of programming during the process. So I started to search for a such tool, and it should have the following criteria:

1. It should easy to use and has minimal system requirements.
2. Has the possibility to writing code.
3. Has good of documentations and tutorials.
4. Should be running on multiple platform (desired, not required).
5. Should support 2D and 3D (desired, not required).
6. Free to use.

My final decition was to give Game Maker Studio this possibility. In this project I've create an Asteroid game, with minimal of programming, to make sure that it's possible for non-programmers to create some games with minimal of coding. The Asteroid game contains only 16 lines of written codes. Mostly because I coudln't find out how to display a variable and adding highscore by using the 'drag n' drop' method. Anyway, my conclusion of this experiment, it's possible for non-programmers to create a game without any code. My next experiment would be to see whether Game Maker Studio is suitible as a tool for learning programming.