More game engines at http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2007/02/game-programming-tools.html

An alternative to google ranking:
Game Maker 460 delicious bookmarks
Scratch 516
Squeak 327
microworlds 42

Tony

Hey, by that measure, I could invent an extremely popular programming language just by calling it “Britney Spears” (34.7 million hits)!

Again, my point was to give teachers a list of options. it’s going to be a personal choice, and I think some teachers will find different features of these various engines appealing to them.

I think your insights on the different languages are really valuable, but some of the features that you find intriguing are going to be obstacles for other people (and vice versa). I’m not advocating for any engine in particular, just that people TRY IT.

i think we can agree on that!

How do we explain these stats, the comparatively low microworlds figure? I don’t think it’s just because of teachers not “getting it”, it also had something to do with the implementation

At the time I moved away from Microworlds (5-6 years) ago and started using Game Maker, the UI of MicroWorlds was clunky, old fashioned and the program itself was quite buggy. The logo world seemed to lack energy and youth. With Game Maker, the UI and products looked professional and comparable to good 2D game engines and there was a vibrant, growing community

If only Seymour Papert and Brian Harvey (Berkely logo adapted by George Mills to MSW logo) could have collaborated, if only object logo had been successful … there was a great product there that was never developed to its full potential IMHO

Now Seymour and Alan Kay (formerly Apple, Disney) are FOSS fans with the OLPC. I think that’s great

btw I notice that etoys has the pen down / pen up of logo, expanded to include dots for example to track car acceleration etc.

I hasten to add that under the hood any version of logo, as a version of LISP, is better than Game Maker from a Computer Science viewpoint. But that’s a hard one to sell to the kids. We need the great drag and drop which is found in scratch, etoys and game maker to make a smooth start in those mixed year 9 classes

I think, though, you are wrong about MicroWorlds. It’s actually a good example of why some things are free, some things are open source, and some are commercial products. There’s room for all of them, and reasons to choose between them.

Free software is not free if you spend your precious time and can’t make it work. There are many open source and free Logo programming languages (a few listed here), but they lack documentation and many times are buggy. I believe that many teachers want to jump into game making, but don’t want to spend their time fussing around with buggy, undocumented experiemental programs.

MicroWorlds costs money, but is stable, works on current OS machines, has teacher resources and lots of support from the company that makes it. I think the value is clearly there.

To make a viable open source option, like Linux, there have to be enough programmmers invested in the upkeep to make it work. As you say in your blog post, Scratch may look good on paper, but is still a work in progress.

Now with OLPC, this may change as the user base widens, but that is yet to be seen.

Scratch seems the best to me now for getting started but I also like Etoys a lot and it’s being distributed on the OLPC

I love logo but moved away from it because they could never get the implementation quite right IMO. Pity that MicroWorlds wasn’t developed as a FOSS product years ago

Toontalk, very cool, totally visual programming – hard to develop worksheets for it though