A few weeks ago, my son got a copy of Wii Play, a set of simple mini-games for the Nintendo Wii.
His favorite, by far, is the tank game, which is sort of an adaptation of the Atari 2600 classic. The innovation is that you point + shoot where you want the bullets to go with the Wii Remote.
Looking for a fun programming project, similar to the Asteroids project I did last year, I thought that I would do a tank game. I thought it would be fun to involve Ethan, too.
So, I decided to treat him as a product owner and ask him about the game. I asked him about the “things” in the game and he identified the tanks, bullets, bombs, rockets, walls, etc. pretty well. I then asked him what a tank could do and he came up with move, shoot bullets, and drop bombs.
“So” I asked him. “do you know what part of speech these things are… tanks, bullets, walls”
“They are nouns”
“Right! I said, and now for the things that these nouns do, like move, shoot and drop?”
“Those are herbs!”
I’ll keep the blog updated with progress on the tank game.