Besides the programming aspects, one of the great things is that it teaches about the sciences as well. Even the most trivial games require use of basic physics concepts like vector math and the laws of motion, and require mathematical integration for the time stepping. Game programming is a great educational vehicle for lots of reasons.
Yeah, and music programming is fun too. As well, text adventures - with natural language processing - can teach a lot about language.
- Using wordnet API to construct a text adventure.
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