STEM Possibilities Through Programming the Nintendo DS

Josh Fishburn, a grad student over at U. Denver, graduate RA at the NSF, and adjunct at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, notes on his blog a YouTube video of a French team controlling a robot through a homebrewed software mod for the Nintendo DS.

I agree with Josh that the possibilities of programming in a “closed” system are intriguing. It reminds me of listening to Elliot Soloway over at GoKnow, in a lecture he gave at UNT, regarding the travails GoKnow had when setting out to create a truly educational game for the Nintendo GameBoy. At the time, Nintendo was not at all interested in educational games, perhaps fearing a negative backlash toward the GAMEboy brand if too many titles promoted educational objectives. My how times have changed, with the BrainAge series and other educational titles for the DS out there. Of course, Nintendo’s main handheld product is not referred to as a GAMEboy anymore, either; it’s now simply known as the DS.  

There have always been ways of programming your own game cartridges, though such efforts have largely been the purview of uber-geek programmers willing to poke around in grey market areas. Perhaps, as Josh’s video shows, closed system programming may become more prevalent. Certainly Microsoft has seen the light with their XNA programming initiative for the Xbox.

If Nintendo or another company offered a simple way to program or modify game cartridges, millions of young boys and girls the world over might well take a stronger interest in computer programming. I suspect math and engineering initiatives would get a major boost from such an initiative.

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categories DS, GBA, Game Discussion, Game Writing, Making Video Games, Nintendo, Serious Games, Xbox | John Rice | datetime February 16, 2008 2:35 pm

No Comments

  • By Free Xbox 360, February 24, 2008 @ 4:56 am

    Hi,
    Its really fantastic to read this kind of the post .This is really a good creation . This is really awesome …
    Psychos will always be psychos; they don’t need video games to help them..Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock and roll.I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.Movies and acting in general are art forms, so is music, painting, graphics, sculpture, and so on. Some might even consider classic games like chess to be an art form. Video games use elements of all of these to create something new. Why wouldn’t video games be an art form?Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do.

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