Children love playing digital games. In fact, these games can also prove to be an effective learning tool for them. Designing learning games is an excellent technique to help children develop analytical thinking skills and encourage self-expression. It can also be used to teach them the fundamentals of coding and programming. Here are four apps that can help your little learner do more with their love for game development. Read on to know more.
Scratch
Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children as well as a free, block-based coding language. It comes with a simple visual interface that allows kids aged 8 to 16 years to create digital stories, games, and animations. By using Scratch, your school-goer can explore their computational thinking and problem-solving abilities. It promotes innovative teaching and learning, self-expression, collaboration, and computer equity. You can also help your kids look up a few tutorials to get them started with creating their games and animations. Scratch is designed, developed, and moderated by the Scratch Foundation, a non-profit organisation.
Sketch Nation
Sketch Nation Create is a visual tool that allows users to quickly and easily create games without having to know how to code. Kids can make their own games or play games that others have made. You can help your children create side-running, up-jumping, side-flying, traffic, lander, up-scrolling, platformer, match-2, or match-3 games through this app. After deciding on the game genre, kids can work in either simple or advanced mode, depending on how many levels they wish to include.
GameSalad Creator
GameSalad Creator helps kids design games using drag and drop feature where they also learn computer science and programming. It allows children to develop their own video games with a sophisticated visual programming interface. Through this app, your kids studying across K-12 grades can easily learn Computer Science as well as logical thinking and problem solving without bothering about the rules of syntax.
GameSalad Creator provides a graphical user interface for describing the rules and the behaviour of game objects, called Actors, without knowledge of programming or scripting languages. The app includes a behaviour library (for moving, modifying attribute states, causing collision, saving, and so on) that can be put into rules and other behaviour groups to generate new effects.
Kodu Game Lab
Using a basic visual programming language, Kodu Game Lab allows children to develop games on Windows PCs. It is available on Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP operating systems. It is a free to use tool and requires no product keys. Kodu may be used to teach programming as well as creativity, problem solving, and narrative. Anyone, from young children to adults with no design or programming experience, can use Kodu Game Lab to create a game. Kodu's programming approach is simple, and it can be programmed with a game controller or a keyboard and mouse combo. Programming practices, such as symbolic variables, branching, loops, numeric and string manipulation, sub-routines, polymorphism, etc. have been eliminated in it.