Show HN: My first Open Source project -- Teaching my son Lua | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My first Open Source project -- Teaching my son Lua

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33 pointsshawndumas19 comments

A Lua Text Adventure Engine: Having settled on lua as a first 'real' programming language to teach my son I created a text adventure engine for him to code up some games. (He had a blast with MIT's Scratch and Lego's MindStorms.)

There are two complete, albeit short, examples for him / you to get started with. I am learning Lua as well and so far I love it. Since I am a beginner to Lua I am certain that I am not coding idiomatically; any suggestions are welcome.

How old is your son?

10; His eyes where glazing over when I was talking about abstract concepts. He really liked Scratch because it was immediately available; very audio-visual.

Once I got one complete adventure written he was excited to do the second with me. Now hopefully he'll take one from cradle to grave with only oversight from me.

You might have a look at two projects of mine related to gaming and lua:

http://geolua.com/ - Allows you to develop mobile games for the browser using lua. http://geolua.com/adventure/all-widgets-demo-132 shows a basic example.

http://github.com/dividuum/infon - A multiplayer game where players control ant-like creatures using lua. They fight, evolve and compete for food. https://github.com/dividuum/infon/tree/master/contrib/bots has some example code.

I will totally be checking them out. Thank you.

Feel free to contact me (email in profile) if you have any questions.

Will do. Thanks again!

My daughter's almost 5 but she's shown a strong interest in programming from early on. I had an XO for a time, and she was absorbed with Turtle from the get-go. Still a little young, I think, for Lua but your experience has got me thinking about it. Cheers.

I have an 8 year old, who is video game crazy. Lua is a tidy little language which I had a hard time deciding it against python and javascript. The Löve 2D game engine for Lua eventually settled it for me.

For me it was Codea and iLuaBox. My son was stoked to know that he will soon be getting an iPad.

BTW: I also made a little game to check out Codea -- https://gist.github.com/gists/2762088/

I added a Getting Started [1] page to the GitHub wiki and I included a very simple example adventure [2].

----

[1]: https://github.com/shawndumas/adventure.lua/wiki/Getting-Sta...

[2]: https://github.com/shawndumas/adventure.lua/blob/master/xamp...

I'm sorry, if this is off topic, but is it common to put your project files into version control system? I'm talking about .sublime-project and .sublime-workspace.

Don't rightly know. I did it because I work on the project from multiple computers using SublimeText and found it convenient.

I chose python and html/css/javascript for my kid, who is 9, the python game book got him started and now I was challenged at dinner table by various Python module questions...

first thing after he started html, is: why can't html have if-else?

That's where the embedded Ruby or AngularJS comes in... :)

Which python game book? This one...

http://inventwithpython.com/

or some of the others. I'm thinking of doing the same with my son this summer.

yes it's this one, I bought one for him so he can read anywhere he wants to, this is a great book for his age.

JavaScript/HTML/CSS is the eventual target. Lua is like JS-the-good-parts with better syntax, TCO and coroutines.

My guess is he'll hate the transition for awhile but will have a lot of great habits and concepts that will really serve him well in JS.

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