Dana in Geeksville

Engaging the Interest of Digital Natives

Last night I stood behind my 15 year old son, watching as he dragged and dropped blocks of textures and colors, shapes and patterns from Photoshop into an online game called Counterstrike.  From there, he created walls for a building, wallpaper for the rooms, secret doorways, and an assortment of other stuff. Later, he built roads, and within three hours, other gamers traversed in his newly created world, battling it out.

I realized as I watched how easily he created a community shared world that gaming and programming in general have taken a huge shift. Long gone are the days of providing simple scenes or fixed worlds for the background in games. These days, digital natives, like my son, expect to change the virtual gaming worlds they step into, add to it, or customize it. These games are also well equipped with chat tools for easy communication between team members or friends. Games are social networks, not entirely unlike places like Second Life.

I realized that engaging these young people in programming is getting increasing difficult in spite of their ease of use with computers.

Convincing the future generation that writing lines of code is fun just isn't going to cut it. Digital natives are used to elaborate drag and drop utilities that allow them to create entire virtual worlds. They just aren't going to settle for working on a command-line, or sifting through lines and lines of code.

Now, not only are game developers having to put a lot of work into making these games totally interactive and realistic looking, but they have to invest a lot of time in making it so the gamer can take over the creation of that world through simple drag and drop, and file sharing features.

It's been interesting to watch gaming over the last 26 years. The games my first son played are nothing compared to the games my youngest son plays and creates. Children now are typing away as they learn the alphabet. In fact, for many that's how they learn the alphabet!

These digital natives are smart and fast. Just try to keep up, just try to keep them engaged. They're movin' at lightning speed!

Recently I've been creating a series of articles aimed at anyone over the age of 10 to learn the Java programming language through a fun tool called Greenfoot. Tools like this allow kids to dig into programming visually, get a basic understanding of the code, and see instant results by objects already created within the tool itself. As the programming behind the scenes gets more complex, so can the game.

Yet, I'm realizing that perhaps these tutorials may not pack the punch they need to, especially for teens used to creating virtual worlds through drag and drop. It would also be interesting to know how many of these teens who are used to action packed video games shift into the slower gear necessary to write code. Perhaps the teens who want to program are not necessarily the same ones who are building virtual worlds and universes through drag and drop. Or maybe they are. It's worth looking into more, and I plan on revisiting this topic in the future.

Posted at 04:14PM Aug 11, 2008 by dananourie in Digital Natives  |  Comments[2]