At NDC Oslo, Sean Trelford did a lightning talk on composing 3D objects using F# and OpenGL. Oh, and he’s 8 years old. Sean (and his dad, Phil) talk to Jon about learning coding with Small Basic and F#, and how it’s fun to learn coding by building video games.
Download / Listen: Herding Code 213: Sean Trelford on Composing 3D Objects with F# and OpenGL
Show Notes:
- Hello
- (0:34) Sean is eight years old, but that didn’t keep him from giving an NDC talk on composing 3D Objects with F# and OpenGL.
- Sean’s Talk
- (1:13) Jon asks Sean whether he showed slides or did live coding.
- (1:39) Sean made an army from one 3D man model.
- (2:09) Jon asks how difficult it is to call OpenGL from F#. Sean’s dad, Phil, explains how Sean used a domain specific language – about 50 lines of code. You can use it to create shapes like cubes and spheres, color them, transform them, etc.
- (3:30) Phil explains how Sean used the F# REPL to create and modify 3D objects interactively, then used functional composition to put the parts (head, arms, legs) together to build the army man, the used functional composition and aggregation to create the army.
- Learning Small Basic and F#
- (4:37) Jon asks Sean if F# is his first computer language; Sean says he started with Small Basic. Jon asks if he found it difficult to move from Small Basic to F#, Sean and Phil explain how F# is actually a pretty natural step from Small Basic. Small Basic has no functions with parameters, so when they had a project that ran into that limitation they just moved the code from Small Basic to F# and used the Small Basic library to construct 2D shapes (leveraging WPF).
- Fun Basic
- (7:02) Phil said that last year he and Sean rewrote Small Basic as Fun Basic (available free in the Windows Store). It’s an IDE with IntelliSense, code completion, etc. It’s got backward compatibility with Small Basic, but includes function with arguments, pattern matching, etc.
- Learning programming with video games
- (8:02) Jon asks about what next for Sean. Recently they went to a game jam and made a platform game. Phil says the REPL environment is huge for game building.
- (9:04) Jon mentions the IoT lab at NDC and asks Sean if he’s done anything with IoT; Sean says no. Jon says it seems like people try to get kids interested in coding with IoT, but maybe games are more fun to get started. Phil says that Sean’s got a Minecraft channel on YouTube. Jon asks Sean about making videos about making games.
- (10:38) Phil says he got started on computers with games – he made his first game when he was 11, but his first commercial game was when he was 14 – Flint Eastwood.
- (11:44) Jon asks Sean if this is his first time in Olso, and his first conference. It’s his first time in Oslo, and his first "speaking" oriented conference.
- 11:28 Jon asks if they’ve got any last messages, maybe to encourage kids to get started with coding. Phil recommends the Hour of Code, as well as other resources online. Phil says his older son got into programming by adding levels to games, then writing scripts for AI’s, etc. Phil says that’s how he got started – looking at other peoples’ code and going from there. Don’t necessarily get hung up on fancy coding concepts, just script something and have fun!