Being a homeschooling dad who is a self proclaimed nerd comes with a great deal of responsibility and it also tools my children in extremely unique ways. We just brought our newest baby girl home (yes, she is awesome!) and I am taking 2 weeks off to help my wife with the adjustments that come with having another baby at home. One way I am helping is taking over the homeschooling for a couple of weeks.

I know what your thinking: 4 boys and dad, mom is cuddling with the new baby girl - video games, junk food and movies, whoo hoo!! Well, almost...

My wonderful wife hooked me up with a lesson plan and the directive: “If you just get one or two things done that will be great.” Looking over the curriculum I saw math, reading, handwriting(who needs that?), science (cool we can blow stuff up), history (really that’s where that subject should stay), and so on. I mean my wife has this thing put together so well I felt like I might actually be able to pull off teaching my kids something other than the Konami code (a.k.a the Contra code) or how to beat Zelda (which we did).

Something felt like it was missing. So for two weeks we decided to ditch history and replace it with developing a game from 0 bits to shared. I will be teaching my 6 and 5 year olds with the following in mind:

The constraints:

  1. The source must be shared via github and in a compiled playable format with in two weeks.
  2. The focus will be on creating, experiencing and sharing code not the framework or deep syntax itself (so we will be using greenfoot, gosu or something like them).
  3. The two students will write all of the code using XP and scrum with an occasional booster script from me
  4. The two students provide all of the content: music, graphics, story and code
  5. We will have fun

I am really looking forward to taking on this challenge and will be chronicling it daily, so keep up with us and follow what we are doing. I know the boys and I hope that it will inspire other parents and kids to try it out and see how far a little creativity will take them.

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Related posts: kid gamification - day 1,
kid gamification - day 2,
kid gamification - day 3, the finale