encouraging letter

I received this encouraging and interesting letter from Canada last week. The reflection about programming is interesting from the perspective of learning styles:

I am a young man of 23 years of age, and have just finished reading your article entitled "Something is making me do it" which I feel compelled to write to you about.

I first want to say how great I think it is of you to teach kids/teens about game making and basic programming skills. You definitely have the right attitude and are on to something.

I myself am struggling with Game Maker, trying to learn how to make it do my deeds, with the larger goal of building interactive games of fine craftmanship. I do not consider myself a programmer, I really despise computer programming, but my creative urges are pushing me to overcome this feeling. I consider myself more of a artist/designer.

So, for me, it really is a matter of:

Creative work (right side of the brain) v.s. Logical work (left side of the brain)

The exciting stuff is in thinking up the design, the game rules, the look, the gameplay.

The boring head-splitting part is actually implementing it. In particular, the logistics, the scripting.

I get sick of it quite easily, I'm still at a fairly early stage of development, and am trying to deal with it by tiny incrementals.

Friendly, image-rich tutorials help a lot, since I'm a visual kind of guy, and I try to introduce myself to the logical part slowly, piece by piece. I also try to psychologically separate creative tasks from logical tasks. So, when I'm coding, I leave all the excitement from the creation alone, and try to concentrate on the mathematical aspects. Separating the two helps a lot.

That's all I wanted to say

Tags:

• mail
• programming