Current Events > How much of zachtronics games apply to programming?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I adore those games, and want to learn programming as a hobby. Would any of them, particularly senzen, tis 100, and exapunks, be a good starting point if I also intend to learn actual languages?

Also, what are other great programming games?

Code combat is a new web based tool for learning the fundamentals of programming.

I'd also recommend MIT Scratch or Google blockly, the latter which actually renders your "code" into a bunch of different languages.

If you're looking more traditional tutorials, though, code academy is really good.

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as far as I can tell they're more about the mindset than the actual language, things like how to determine conditionals, where to break down a large problem into a set of smaller loopable problems, that sort of thing. Which might sound sort of lame but for some people is actually a really hard skill to pick up so it's good to know
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Mr Hangman posted...

All three of them are reasonably close to assembly language programming, but almost nobody does any programming in assembly. If you're good at it you can write extremely small and efficient programs, but it's so low level that it takes a long time to do simple things.

Yeah that's how I understood it. I don't really know what I'm looking to do, just that it's going to be a casual hobby, never really looking to sell or make money. I wanna make stupid programs that do cool things, mod my phone with Tasker, stuff like that.

kirbymuncher posted...

as far as I can tell they're more about the mindset than the actual language, things like how to determine conditionals, where to break down a large problem into a set of smaller loopable problems, that sort of thing. Which might sound sort of lame but for some people is actually a really hard skill to pick up so it's good to know

Yeah, that is one of my favorite parts so far. In exapunks when I solve a problem it's so satisfying, but then I can go back later and solve it again :)