[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