Wow, you triggered a real flood of memories for me. I remember being bored in in an unrelated training course and using debug.com to write 320x240 scrollers with rep movsb. Being a kid I had no internet access at the time so a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and Borland's Turbo C++ documentation was pretty much all the documentation I had. Then later discovering djgpp and protected mode, what a time to be alive!
I really want to let my kids (7 / 11) have a simple programming environment where they can get stuff done quickly. They have struggled a little with Python so far (it always comes down to needing complex libraries to do what they want e.g. write simple games.) Anyone have suggestions for an alternative language to let them be fairly self-starting?
GameMaker Studio is excellent for this. It's how I started way back when. It has a built in Sprite editor, and allows you to create object with physics and interactions using a drag-and-drop interface. And there's a ECMAScript based language you can drop down to when they want to go deeper.
I showed a bit of JS and while Scratch did get a bit of the way in explaining concepts, it's simply too inefficient to get anything "serious" done.
What stuck for my older kid (12 now but started with it at 11 or earlier) was Roblox (with it's Studio), he was already playing the game a lot and making levels was fun and to get them beyond the basics one needs to script and even if 3d maths really were above his head (I've explained 2d/3d vectors and angles) the connection to something "real" has really helped him push through most obstacles. He writes horrible code by copying kinda bad tutorials on Youtube but getting things done is fun enough that he just keeps going and lately helping him debug issues I've noticed that he's started to develop the intuition about reasoning about states and the effects code has on it in an async picture.
TL;DR Find the areas your kid might have passion in and if there's a way to mod/play with it with code the sheer fun will help them push through the drudge.
I guess it depends on their competency, but something like https://scratch.mit.edu/ is really good for really young kids.
Alternatively if your kids are a bit further along then why not try re-create your childhood experience?
In my case I'd spin up a virtual box with DOS 6 installed and a copy of QBasic, because hacking away at the GORILLA.BAS source code to try make my bananas more explosive was how it all started for me at a very young age.
Point being - QBasic was pretty easy to pick up with little external support.
Hope that helps!
That being said, what has your experience with Python been like? What else have you tried?
One problem I've found as the expectations of what a computer game or program 'should' look like has exploded. Making a circle move across the screen doesn't hold the same fascination with kids today as it used to. GORILLA.BAS was pretty close to a game that used to cost real money when it first game out.
Back in my day I could look at the very simple game I wrote in a a few hundred lines of Basic and see a path from there to commercial games that came in a box. Today my daughter looks at the simple thing we did in Scratch, then looks at Fornite, and sees no connection between the two.
I guess it depends on exposure. My son was moving the cat around in ScratchJr last week and he is definitely HOOKED. We've hardly touched it and he keeps talking about it / wanting me to give him simple loop instructions for him to act out as if he was the ScratchJr cat.
