My experiences with the educational outlook on video game programming is very different.
I put together a video game programming club for the junior high school my nephew was in. The response was phenomenal. The teachers loved it, the principal talked about it every time he got a chance and the club was featured in several local news outlets as an example of the excellence and modernity of the local school system.
The language was C# using the (sadly now defunct) XNA game development framework, and it wasn't long before I had 7th and 8th graders making games/winform/console apps of all sorts. We made a 2D side-scrolling space shooter and a tower defence game and the parents are still begging me to put it on again, which I sadly cannot due to a moving out of the area.
One thing I will say, and I spoke of this to all the kids, is the game development can be a very harsh environment. Often with substandard pay, long hours and tons of stress. Which I found out first hand as I went into the game dev industry right out of college and quickly decided it was not a fit for me (being that I enjoy having a life outside of my career). But game development as a hobby is an excellent way to build up programming chops, have a ton of fun, and even work your way into the game industry if you find it fits your life/career goals.
In regards to the article, the teacher seems likely to be acting under the mistaken assumption that anything that involves computer games was "bad, mmmkay". I feel it is a safe statement to make the video games can have a positive affect on youth as I go interested in computers in general and programming specifically when I got into the Diablo 1 hacking/trainer scene so many years back. I was light years ahead of the read of my peers entering freshmen CS already familiar with visual studio, C++, memory debugging, binary dis-assembly and the many other tools of the game hacking trade.
You don't have to scare them off too hard from games. Games are the gateway drug for programming... more then half of the freshmen coming in to university CS programs want to write games, but they all get distracted or change their mind along the way.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 17.9 ms ] threadI put together a video game programming club for the junior high school my nephew was in. The response was phenomenal. The teachers loved it, the principal talked about it every time he got a chance and the club was featured in several local news outlets as an example of the excellence and modernity of the local school system.
The language was C# using the (sadly now defunct) XNA game development framework, and it wasn't long before I had 7th and 8th graders making games/winform/console apps of all sorts. We made a 2D side-scrolling space shooter and a tower defence game and the parents are still begging me to put it on again, which I sadly cannot due to a moving out of the area.
One thing I will say, and I spoke of this to all the kids, is the game development can be a very harsh environment. Often with substandard pay, long hours and tons of stress. Which I found out first hand as I went into the game dev industry right out of college and quickly decided it was not a fit for me (being that I enjoy having a life outside of my career). But game development as a hobby is an excellent way to build up programming chops, have a ton of fun, and even work your way into the game industry if you find it fits your life/career goals.
In regards to the article, the teacher seems likely to be acting under the mistaken assumption that anything that involves computer games was "bad, mmmkay". I feel it is a safe statement to make the video games can have a positive affect on youth as I go interested in computers in general and programming specifically when I got into the Diablo 1 hacking/trainer scene so many years back. I was light years ahead of the read of my peers entering freshmen CS already familiar with visual studio, C++, memory debugging, binary dis-assembly and the many other tools of the game hacking trade.