Hi!
Soon I’ll have my little nephew (13) in my company to check out software development for a week.
I’m working with large industry machines in real time Linux systems, so obviously I’d show him my test machine and if the customer agrees, I can show him some robots as well.
Also, he will get some crash course in computer basics.
He is an avid gamer - although not really good with computers.
I’ve gifted him a still nice laptop with Linux and Steam installed 1-2 years ago and he happily played Minecraft, but after some time he went back to his Switch 2.
Now he uses my Steam Deck - although that doesn’t make that much of a difference…
I’d like to give him something fun as an exercise, that’s is early rewarding.
Perfect would be, if he could code himself a little computer game, but that’s completely out of my normal work stuff and I don’t know what good options are available.
I guess starting with C++ and an Unreal engine or similar is more than an overkill.
Is there something, that is teaching the basics and gives rather quick rewards, which can produce a little something after 2-3 days?
Thank you all in advance!
As a person who started with high-level languages, I will say that they severely hinder one’s understanding of how systems really work. I recommend having him start out with the C programming language or a similar low-level language.
Some exercises that you could have him do include:
On programming games:
If you want him to program a game for himself, I would recommend SDL (SDL2 or SDL3) if he’s doing it in C. It may be in his interests to program the game in another language than C, though, since C can be difficult to program games in, for beginners.
Some good ideas for a game to start out with are Yahtzee (like the KDE program Kiriki), Minesweeper, Pong, or Breakout. If he’s doing it with a game engine, I recommend having him start out with Godot. It’s FLOSS, and GDScript is easy to learn.
Yeah, I started with turbo Pascal and C/C++, and that gave me quite some advantage to understand more modern concepts
But he is too computer illiterate for that at the moment.
I’m not sure, if this will be too much just to have some hello world and calculator examples done, that probably aren’t as exciting.
He probably won’t be a developer in the future, but I want to give him some understanding and insight on the fun with it.
If he would be with me for a month, C/C++ and an automatic cat toilet control would be the task.
But a week isn’t much.
I’ll probably make one day, where I show different coding language concepts.
I’ll probably do also a day about logic gates and elementary logic. Maybe here a C++ hello world could actually spice up things ;-)
Maybe. C++ is very complex, and has a lot of footguns, which is why I recommend avoiding it when possible. Giving a memory-unsafe language like C object-oriented capabilities was like giving a toddler a gun.
I think Minesweeper or Breakout in Godot would be good projects to give him that would take him a few hours. I wish you well in teaching him!