https://hive.saysi.org/pico8

I've been using PICO-8 to introduce teens to coding the traditional way, irl, for 5 years now. I've tried a lot of different ways of doing so: thru lecturing, found tutorials, providing a lot of boilerplate and letting kids play around with changing sprites and stuff, lots of 1-on-1... but I've been thinking long and hard about how to do it better.

I teach New Media at an after school art program (saysi.org) in an open studio environment that only superficially resembles a classroom. Students are a mix of teens of all ages and proficiencies and they do very little listening to instructors lecture and a lot of making stuff.

My students play games and dunning-kruger-ly imagine themselves capable of making them, but can be simultaneously terrified of anything that smells of math and can quickly get discouraged with the slightest bit of friction.

My ideal tutorial would introduce them to coding one concept at a time, but empower them to make creative doodles every step of the way, with whatever knowledge they've collected thus far. It would also free me from lecturing and allow me to do more troubleshooting and 1-on-1 in the studio. Not finding anything like that, I started my own little series. I have been putting them on Youtube for others to hopefully benefit from!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQIH9CiDAqf8LQYnbZ9GJ4XEfHXb7EdvZ

The source code and other PICO-8 resources we collected can be found on our PICO-8 portal: https://hive.saysi.org/pico8

I'd be happy to hear any feedback, especially from other teachers or beginner coders!

This is excellent! Fantastic work. I always love seeing good beginner-friendly tutorials like this and this seems very accessible to beginners. Thank you for sharing. :)

Thanks, I appreciate it.