51–60 of 125 posts
Why aren't kids able to read text written in rows like everyone else? Programming languages just for kids seems mostly like a way to limit them.
Why is BASIC totally left out? An entire generation was inspired by power-on basic in C64 and other platforms. More than just "inspired"... Some huge amount of today's technology wouldn't exist otherwise. I know I'm stuck in the past, but that's what I want for my kids. Flip open the laptop and boom, theres my programming environment, except now with easier graphics/sound APIs. Anyone know how to get this, without bu…
I've always been suspicious of the looks-like-an-animal-with-a-name-and-a-smiley-face-I'm-a-grown-up-and-this-is-what-kids-like approach. I remember one of the coolest things about the apple II was that you could 'poke' the right memory address and get the speaker to click. That was magic when I was 12 and it didn't need a friendly name and a stupid grin. Until they're old enough for K&R (12?, 13?, 14?), maybe they s…
I was certainly in a similar boat (though a later generation of computers) whereby I found around age 9 that "poking" at a computer (either plugging random things in, or clicking random buttons or keys) enough yielded some interesting/mildly entertaining results. Of course, many times, these results ended with being grounded for breaking something, but nonetheless, the endless possibilities of random keystrokes and m…
It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't know what is hard.
https://github.com/LLK/scratch-html5
Is it really impossible to have Scratch without Flash?
I want to play this Scratch game without Flash:
"computational thinking concepts"
What are they? I ask this in all seriousness.
Why are there no links to the talked about studies in the article? Or are they there and I missed them?
http://taoofmac.com/space/dev/Kids
(my kids are moving on from Scratch, and we eventually settled on Python, but I'm keeping tabs on other options)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have been saying "you're never again going to see a generation that has the patience to X" for generations, when really X is just no longer a thing anyone wants to do. When was the last time you typed in source code from a magazine? These days we all expect software to be more complex than what you can fit on a printed page. People have patience for the things they find exciting: nobody is excited by dinky typ…
I still type in source code when I'm going through tutorials for new languages or libraries. I find I absorb it better than I'd I copied and pasted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first PC videogame I ever saw was a gorilla throwing a barrel at buildings. It was written in BASIC and came with our 286 back in 1989. I was really excited to learn how the monkey was drawn - out of the same ASCII blocks as everything else, obviously, but how ? - and excitedly opened the file in a text editor. It was a little overwhelming to my 7-year-old self to see just how many little subroutines and subproce…
Gorillas for QBASIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)
Scratch is a great idea, but it's a pity that the current implementation is Flash-only. The HTML5 repo has not seen any work in 2 years: https://github.com/LLK/scratch-html5 Is it really impossible to have Scratch without Flash? I want to play this Scratch game without Flash: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/63476480/
Also, Snap! is basically Scratch without Flash, but with everything awesome from SICP: http://snap.berkeley.edu/run/
Scratch is a great idea, but it's a pity that the current implementation is Flash-only. The HTML5 repo has not seen any work in 2 years: https://github.com/LLK/scratch-html5 Is it really impossible to have Scratch without Flash? I want to play this Scratch game without Flash: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/63476480/
Try Phosphorus, an HTML5 Scratch interpreter: http://phosphorus.github.io/#63476480 Also, Snap ! is basically Scratch without Flash, but with everything awesome from SICP: http://snap.berkeley.edu/run/
http://phosphorus.github.io/#64974428
Snap looks cool, though! It can even import Scratch projects! Neat!