e-Learning Authoring Research Blog

The point that you made about the creation experience being fun because what we are creating should be engaging and fun is a great one. I wonder, what can be done to inject fun into the creation experience? 
 
Lately I've been spending quite a lot of time with a game creation tool called GameSalad <a>http://www.gamesalad.com (its Mac only and free if you don't care to publish to iPhone). I've found the creation experience to be quite fun and rewarding in GameSalad. As I step back and ask myself, why is this fun? I think one of the big factors is context.  
 
In GameSalad, whenever you're creating logic, it is always abundantly clear which object(s) that logic will impact. The result of the logic is also very easily viewable. All you have to do is click a little play button. There's no compile time--the object just appears on the screen with your logic/controls applied to it. That’s very cool. 
 
The other aspect that’s fun is dragging and dropping controls and logic, grouping things together and coming up with conditionals all WITHOUT having to write any code. 
 
The opposite of fun would have to be writing code which means having to learn a syntactical language - -blech...totally unfun.