[tombert]

I bought the Humble Bundle for this in like 2011, and I played it a bit, but I ended up having a lot more fun with the included Pico-8 that came a bit later.

I think primarily I just found it a lot more approachable than anything else.

[onemoresoop]

I love PICO-8 too. There are so many games, and they’re all free to play, with the source code available to explore or modify. Games are also reltively easily published online. Some PICO-8 games are genuine works of art. I’m always impressed by how creative people become when working within tight constraints. I wish I’d had something like this when I was a kid. I always recommend Pico-8 to like minded folks, sometimes kids.

[tombert]

I used to volunteer at a program in my local library that was designed to get kids into tech. They wanted someone to teach programming.

I bought like ten Pico-8 licenses for it [1], and used that to teach some simple programming. I figured that a simple platform like Pico-8 is still "real" programming, but you can go from "zero to viewable product" very quickly, which would be more fun for the kids; certainly less frustrating than trying to teach about vertex shaders and Vulkan.

Sadly none of the kids really took to it, but that's probably more of a criticism of how I was teaching than any issues with Pico-8.

[1] It wasn't actually my money. My employer at the time was willing to reimburse me

[emuuuu]

For future reference, there's an Education Edition of Pico-8 you can use for this kind of workshop.

https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php?page=schools

[cptskippy]

I think it was 2013, I bought the same Humble Bundle. It's still in Alpha...