Description: KoduGameLab
3D game programming for kids.
Kodu Game Lab is a 3D game development environment that is designed to teach kids basic programming principles. Kodu allows creators to build the world's terrain, populate it with characters and props, and then program their behaviors and games rules in a bespoke visual programming language. Kodu originated as a project in Microsoft Research. The original target platform was the Xbox 360 using C#, XNA, and releasing via the Indie Games Channel. The choice of releasing on the Xbox informed much of the early
The heart of Kodu is the tile-based programming language. The language is high level in the sense that a lot can be accomplished in a very few lines of “kode” compared to traditional programming. The kode is continuously evaluated so that it immediately reacts to any changes in the state of the world. For instance, the sample below shows how to program a character to find and eat all the apples in the game world. Line 1 says that if the character sees an apple, it should move toward it. If there is more tha