Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

Thanks for the suggestions. A comment system is on my list of features to work on.

I think I have been fleshing out an idea like what you are suggesting from the turtle cursor. I would like to add a step-by-step debugging to WizBang that allows the user to watch variable values and step through each Wizzy (with it being highlighted graphically). If I implemented that, I think it would be a great way to visualize different sorting algorithms.

Edit: I'm also not quite a computer scientist! College drop out! :)

Visual programming is probably more appropriate for teaching.

See this system I've built for teaching binary search tree algorithms. You can use it to teach not just basic binary search tree algorithms but also AVL and red-black tree algorithms.

http://opsis.sourceforge.net

As someone who is forced to do LabView programming to set up experiments in a class, I disagree. LabView is the most unproductive way to code ever. Doing an `if(x<y)` takes like 100 clicks. The reason LabView is acceptable is that it has a lot of libraries for interfacing with hardware, and libraries for displaying measurements (but if I right click on an array view then "copy data" it copies the number as an image (!) instead of the underlying array, WTF?).

I think this is a hard problem - a good tool for beginners would need to be amazing to get any uptake.

The visual programming idioms that Ive noticed having some impact are things like dragging connection points to wire up inputs/outputs or behavior/function calls.

If you look at modern visual GUI design tools such as apple/xcode Interface Builder, wiring components seems to be something that beginner users could understand easily. [Have a look at recent demos from 280 Norths Atlas to see this taken to the web]

Maybe you could work with a school computer hobbies class as an ongoing project to see how they learn in practice - perhaps offer it as a visual logic puzzle?

I think this is an interesting approach. You are visually modelling program FLOW - something that is hard to visualize by just looking at text.

I went to Virginia Tech and since the CS department was sucked into the rest of engineering - I ended up taking intro engineering courses (read: a complete waste of time) and they wanted to teach programming to freshman engineers through Alice.

Alice, although the early versions crashed, ran slow, and often saved the XML 'world' files incorrectly, corrupting your work and making you lose it - it did a great job of teaching visual programming because you could easily create a 3D scene or game without much effort, plus it highlighted the code as it ran.

While Wizbang is visual as well (albeit in a different way), the program flow diagrams kind of look like UML diagrams and could STILL scare away novice programmers.

A main issue of teaching programming to new comers is you need to start with the basics - but printing "hello world" to the screen doesn't seem applicable so it feels like they are wasting their time. Besides, most of what they use computers for is pretty and visual.

Wizbang doesn't seem to offer anything else that other learning tools don't do in a better way - except maybe the export to a "real" language.

Now imagine if you could combine that exporting functionality on top of something more visually interesting like Alice. Make a 'game' in Wizlice (Wizbang-Alice), and then export that code (on top of your minimal graphics libraries or functions to support what they write) to C++/Java and let them tinker around with THAT... they'll be on HN in a couple of years tops.

Cool idea, polished effort, please expand visual component!