63 – The Family Gamers Podcast – Potato Pirates with Aditya Batura
Aditya Batura is co-founder and CEO of Codomo Inc., a technology education group based in Singapore. They teach children about programming at an age-appropriate level, and wanted to bring that to a larger community.
Enter Potato Pirates, the game that “teaches 10 hours of programming in 30 minutes”.
Listen to the podcast, and check out their Kickstarter at http://potatopirates.game
Coding is a personal experience without a lot of interpersonal interaction; and there tends to be a steep learning curve. Potato Pirates makes the learning process offline, interacting with other people and removing the worries about syntax.
Potato Pirates teaches many basic programming concepts such as for loops, while loops, conditionals (if/else), switch statements, variables, and creating a complete function or program (known as an attack in-game) before executing it.
We mention Robot Turtles (one of our favorites), which teaches mostly just the logical progression of programming. Potato Pirates is aimed at an older age group and teaches more concepts. We’ve had fun playing it with our family and look forward to playing it with some adults as well.
The good news is that the Kickstarter is already fully funded; if you check it out, you can see what sorts of stretch goals they are aiming for. The game is polished and complete, so as soon as the Kickstarter is done, it will be in production. Potato Pirates should be shipped to the backers before Christmas.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:28 — 26.4MB)