Show HN: Kodable - Programming Fundamentals for Five Year Olds
1–10 of 12 posts
Re: Show HN: Kodable - Programming Fundamentals for Five Year Olds
#2Looks cute, but it would be nice if there was more information on how the game worked -- or a gameplay video.
Re: Show HN: Kodable - Programming Fundamentals for Five Year Olds
#3It's not clear from the screenshots how the arrows map to the fuzz movement. I'd expect it to be like Google's Turing machine doodle: http://www.google.com/doodles/alan-turings-100th-birthday
But I'm not 5. Maybe kids will want to know what yellow does enough to fiddle around and find out.
Thinking about it some more, I guess the clear background means go until you hit a wall, and the colours mean go until you hit this colour. Better iconography might help ( ->| instead of -> ). I'd expect kids will grasp the meaning of symbols really well, but may be easily frustrated if the symbols don't differ how they expect.
Re: Show HN: Kodable - Programming Fundamentals for Five Year Olds
#4I'd love to comment on it if I could actually use it. Please developers, have pity on the Android tablet users. There's only a few million of us (if you include Kindle Fire).
Re: Show HN: Kodable - Programming Fundamentals for Five Year Olds
#5It's not clear from the screenshots how the arrows map to the fuzz movement. I'd expect it to be like Google's Turing machine doodle: http://www.google.com/doodles/alan-turings-100th-birthday But I'm not 5. Maybe kids will want to know what yellow does enough to fiddle around and find out. Thinking about it some more, I guess the clear background means go until you hit a wall, and the colours mean go until you hit th…
> I'd expect kids will grasp the meaning of symbols really well, but may be easily frustrated if the symbols don't differ how they expect.
The game is, in principle, just a REPL. Kids will learn quickly by erring and iterating on their mistakes. ;-).
Re: Show HN: Kodable - Programming Fundamentals for Five Year Olds
#6I'd love to comment on it if I could actually use it. Please developers, have pity on the Android tablet users. There's only a few million of us (if you include Kindle Fire).
I'd like to comment too, but the game doesn't show up in the Japanese AppStore.
Please make it available worldwide (even if they are not localized).
Developers: You are all losing sales of expats and people who do speak English outside the US every single time you don't release apps worldwide.
Re: Show HN: Kodable - Programming Fundamentals for Five Year Olds
#7I find easier to write commands in logo (forward 10) than to write commands in a graphical way. My cousin played adventure games at 4 with the help of a paper with commands that he typed.
Re: Show HN: Kodable - Programming Fundamentals for Five Year Olds
#8I find easier to write commands in logo (forward 10) than to write commands in a graphical way. My cousin played adventure games at 4 with the help of a paper with commands that he typed.
I agree with you somewhat. Turing machines are difficult to abstract into sensible 'commands' or functions without some kind of compiler or intermediate step. The trouble here is that kids get no exposure to abstraction and functions, which I'd argue is more important and fundamental than conditionals and loops, which are really just specialized functions at heart.
Re: Show HN: Kodable - Programming Fundamentals for Five Year Olds
#9Great app. It's a little buggy, but my four year old caught on quickly and made it through the first 5-6 levels before I had to take it away so she could go to bed. As a developer, this made me a very proud daddy!
Re: Show HN: Kodable - Programming Fundamentals for Five Year Olds
#10Great idea, great start, kids (3 & 4) are excited to play - didn't want to go to bed.
A few bugs, like a misplaced arrow sometimes can't be moved any more.
Please make clear why a level failed! The board just kinda disappears the moment the "program" "crashes".
One big recurring issue with games for toddlers: make it very tolerant of multiple touches. Kids often will touch other fingers to the screen, lean side of hand on it, or put other hand on. Try to identify which touch point is the "real" one and focus on that, ignoring others.
Great job! Looking forward to how far the kids take this. Several times a day they ask for "ghost game" (DragonBox, which starts with a ghost as a logo); they'll be asking for this one too.