海角大神

Nostalgic video-game heads made short work of Nintendo鈥檚 NES Classic Edition when it hit stores on Friday, snapping up every copy of the console, which subsequently appeared on eBay at prices several times higher than the original $60.

The company says it鈥檚 鈥渨orking hard to keep up with consumer demand,鈥�,but it鈥檚 keeping would-be buyers鈥� tongues wagging: major retailers, including Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart, only received a handful of units, , and just two minutes after Amazon鈥檚 Friday-morning announcement that the console was available, the online retailer were already sold out.

The Classic Edition is one of two vintage consoles to be reissued recently, reported 海角大神鈥檚 Joseph Dussault last week, with Sega releasing the original Genesis console to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Sonic the Hedgehog. The appeal of those games isn鈥檛 just the province of 40-year-olds longing for the living rooms and arcades of their youth. Some studies say that while classic video games might conjure sweet memories among older audiences, they鈥檙e also a peculiarly good learning tool for teaching kids elemental programming. And a growing model of thought among educators that prizes video-game learning 鈥� and looks ahead to a strong computer-science job field 鈥� seems to suggest that such classics could endure in classrooms over coming generations.

One study led by Northwestern University learning technologist Uri Wilensky with recreating an existing video game, they were four times more likely "to draw inspiration from a game that could be played on an Atari or in an 鈥�80s arcade than on an Xbox or Play Station.鈥澛營t might not be聽just because the earlier games are easier to recreate, the study concluded, since other increasingly popular mobile games tend to use simple mechanics of the sort that are easy to recreate.聽聽

鈥淸I]t is possible that the next generation of great video game developers draw as much inspiration from the classics as they do from modern blockbusters,鈥� wrote Dr. Wilensky and his co-author.

Younger students are also cutting their teeth on programming with vintage games. In聽2013, that in grade schools across the country, kids were building their own video-game replicas of Frogger. It鈥檚 part of an effort by computer scientists to get kids to develop basic proficiency with programming, in order to cultivate future talent for a field that struggles mightily to meet its demand for talent.聽

"Programming should be easy and exciting,鈥� University of Colorado Boulder computer science professor Alexander Repenning said at the time. "But that's not where we are. The perception of students is that it's hard and boring. Our goal is to expose a much larger as well as broader audience to programming by reinventing computer science education in public schools."

Teachers are also embracing video-games as a classroom tool more broadly, . Surveys show that of teachers who make use of video games in the classroom at all, more than half have kids play them at least once a week. And many say that low-performing students generally benefit from them most.