

Show HN: Building a Game with a 6-Year-Old - johnpolacek
http://johnpolacek.com/2014/11/29/building-game-6-year-old/

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Sakes
This is awesome. I am hoping to start teaching my kid programming at age 5.
I've been working with him on his reading since he was around 2. He is 4 now.
He reads pretty well, but amazingly well for a 4 year old. We are on level 2/3
books at the moment.

I was hoping to have taught him basic math skills by now. But unfortunately I
have not had any success with that. He doesn't understand subtraction yet, and
his addition still consists mostly of counting.

I didn't want to push him to hard, because it is more important for me to
instill in him a love of learning rather than teach him specifically how to
read, or his multiplication tables. As a result we haven't progressed as
quickly as I had hoped, but I couldn't be more proud of him.

The trick I use to get him to read is "no video games until reading is done".
There are plenty of days where he opts to not read and not play video games.
And there are plenty of days where he reminds me he can't play until he reads.

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NDizzle
Dunno, man. I just let my kids be kids.

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Sakes
He is still very much a kid. If you met him, you wouldn't know that he could
read unless you asked. To give him this skill took 10-15 minutes every few
days over two years with months in between of no reading.

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johnpolacek
Phaser is awesome. If your kid has an idea for a game, odds are there is
already a decent example or tutorial out there to get you started.
[http://phaser.io](http://phaser.io)

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robjcowell
Been doing a game with my (now) 5 year old daughter for the last year. Also
uses her own hand drawn artwork, which in itself makes for interesting
challenges (mostly collision detection for non tiled sprites) but she's very
much the creative director to my lead developer. She loves that we can but is
less interested in the how at this age

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nutmeg
If you are using Phaser, you can use PhysicsEditor
([https://www.codeandweb.com/physicseditor](https://www.codeandweb.com/physicseditor))
with the P2 physics to auto-trace a picture into a polygon and load it into
Phaser. It is easy and only takes a few minutes.

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kamikazi
very cool! I'll try this with my 4.5 year old - he's just about getting a hang
of an internet as an 'abstract invisible something' \- that like electricity
is out there; that it can be turned on and off. And when it's on he's able to
see pictures of lion tiger and other animals on our tablet. I might just start
by replacing car gif with a lion. Lion on wheels - should be fun heh! :D

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mosselman
Cool! I used to build Lego with my dad, but doing things with computers was
mostly by myself. It would be really fun to just build what a child wants,
without diluting the creativity with adult 'thinking'.

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sogen
I'd recommend Construct2, Friendly, gentle learning curve

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joshdance
Super cool. I hope to do this kind of thing with my kids one day. Thanks for
sharing it.

