Last March, I attended a number of sessions on computer games at South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi). SXSWi is the premier trade show and convention for interactive technology, which covers everything from mobile phones to personal computers to social media. Video games, as you might guess, are a big part of SXSWi. In fact, the conference even has a special section called ScreenBurn devoted solely to video games.

At last year’s SXSWi, much of the game talk was about casual game development, the notion that it didn’t take much to throw together a video game, and that any technologically inclined person could do it. I suppose that this talk was spurred by all the iPhone games that had been thrown together in a week and were raking in thousands of dollar a month on the iTunes store.

At one panel on casual game development, the moderator asked the panelists, “Do you think that you have to know [the programming language] C in order to develop a game?” C is the programming language of choice for game development and other applications. It is not an easy language to learn or to apply. The unanimous answer from the panel to the moderator’s question was, “Well, yes! How could anybody develop a game if they didn’t use C?” I found that opinion echoed over and over at the conference. Casual game development is only casual if you are a hard-core programmer.

“What about kids?” I wanted to ask. I was thinking about Logo, a computer language developed in the late 60s by Seymour Papert (at the MIT AI Lab) and Wally Feurzeig (at BB&N) specifically for kids. Papert hooked Logo up with a graphic turtle that wandered about the screen laying down a track, all under program control. Logo has been developed in many versions and directions, such as StarLogo, which gave programmers as many turtles as they wanted.. Even easier to use is a logo-based programming environment known as Scratch that makes writing programs for turtles (which look like cats in Scratch) as simple as drag-and-drop.

About the same time Alan Kay at Xerox PARC was worked out the principles of object-oriented programming and embodied them in the SmallTalk programming language. Kay always had is eye on kids as programmers and his latest effort along these lines is a SmallTalk based system known as eToys.

Somewhere in between SmallTalk and eToys, Apple Computer’s Andy Hertzfeld developed a product known as HyperCard that brought some features of object-oriented programming to just plain folks, including kids who wanted to make games. Tilestack is a cool web-based version of HyperCard that you or your kids can use to program up games.

Apple’s Advanced Technology Group also developed a development environment known as Cocoa (which should not be confused with their current OS X development system of the same name). Cocoa was like HyperCard on steroids. It gave kids an environment that they could populate with scenery, objects, characters, and the like. Each of these could be given behaviors with a visual programming language that was so simple that it didn’t even look like a programming language. Cocoa was never released, but it lives on in a much cooler version marketed by StageCast Software Inc., and known as StageCast Creator. It’s a great system for making games (but it really needs a better name).

StageCast Creator was not the only object-oriented programming system that showed up in the 90s. Andrew Reppening, who teaches computer science at the University of Colorado, introduced an system called AgentSheets. AgentSheets has been a great hit among kids and teachers and is the basis of an ongoing research project called Scalable Game Design that is devoted to teaching kids how to program. Of course, from the kids’ view, this program gives them the chance to make their own games instead of doing their homework.

No mention of game programming for kids would be complete without mention of Alice, a project started by the late, and deservedly famous, Randy Pausch of Carnegie-Mellon Univiersity. Alice, unlike the other programming systems mentioned above, has its roots in the video game industry, and hence can be used to produce drop-dead gorgeous 3D video games. Still, like the other programming systems, it’s built from the ground up to be used by kids, and to teach them something about programming.

Why did all of these marvelous little game factories escape the notice of everyone at SXSWi last year? I don’t know, but I intend to fix that this year by putting together a panel on game development for kids. You can help make this happen by going to my proposal on SXSWi’s panel picker, voting for the panel, and, if you like making trenchant comments. Please act quickly; the panelpicker closes on September 4. If the panel makes, and if there is enough interest, Twist Education will buy a booth at ScreenBurn just to show off some of the marvelous games developed by kids who don’t know C.