Codename “Boku”, is a Microsoft Research project aimed at making it easy and fun for young kids to learn, understand and apply computer programming skills in the form of games. First announced at Microsoft Research’s TechFest in 2006 so it’s been more than 2 years in the making, game is built with the publically available XNA framework. Anyone who’s peeked at video games in the past 6 months would start drawing comparisons between Little Big Planet on the Playstation 3. As a result of building a XNA game, they are able to publish to both XBOX360 and PC. Currently it is envisioned it could appear on XBOX via the Live Arcade, subject to alignments of the planets. On the PC, there isn’t yet a distribution plan but since the game is currently floating around just 200MB, most of which is audio assets, it shouldn’t be too hard to distribute. They will be working to distributing to schools first then the public. Check the website for release date announcements soon.

Long Zheng