271–280 of 306 posts
For teaching kids (school classes) to code, I have had better success with https://www.codecombat.com than MIT Scratch. Kids had more fun than with scratch and learnt programming actual language.
https://blog.codecombat.com/we-have-open-sourced-everything/
Did you run your own environment?
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Exactly! I think the value of these programming environments is in helping you find new ways to think about problems. Having constraints/limitations can be one way to force that creative rethinking to happen sooner rather than later. Obviously you need to find a good balance though as causing frustration and helplessness would have the opposite effect. I’ve an anecdote of my own that I still think about semi-regularl…
Seriously, I remember programming in constrained environments, for example in a calculator, and how that seemed to boost my creativity. I wonder if something is not lost (in terms of learning) by having such hugely powerful systems with any non-trivial functionality a simple library download away.
Another one: a few months ago I wrote an Awk function which can increment an alphanumeric string, like "A0Z" -> "A1A" -> "A1B" ...
I had to write a BEGIN block which populates global hashes for looking up the successor of a character, and whether it wraps around in its class. By character, I mean string of length 1, of course; there are no characters in Awk.
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> My 7yo was making a number guessing game, and to display a two-digit number we had to make two sprites that had 10 "costumes" (0-9) then do modular math to select the costume for each digit So if your kid is cool with this kind of clever workaround for the limitations of some piece of crap, you have a future software engineer.
Or it's a good lesson on knowing when you're using the wrong tool for the job.
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It seems like Scratch is made specifically for game development, since everything revolves around the concept of manipulating sprites. "Guess the number" is a game, but not the kind of game that this tool was made to create.
Hiscore tables in games are full of numbers.
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Never heard of ubports. Looks interesting. A 40 year old just learned something from a 13 year old. If this is how you're spending your free time, then you have a bright future ahead of you. Keep it up!
You should consider this interaction as an opportunity to also revisit your ageism. I'm all for encouraging young people, and OP seems a really bright 13 years old person, for sure. But try to keep condescension out of the way. As anybody with children can tell you, we all learn from them all the time. It's not something surprising.
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I just think there are so many other forms of distraction today. Young kids are carrying around cell phones, texting their friends. It’s that or they are doing something on Tiktok. They don’t have time to hack like that anymore.
Yes true for most people ( I am 13, Started programming in Java with 10 ) but some also do this other stuff. Like I installed ubports on my second phone today ( Writing this on it )
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You should consider this interaction as an opportunity to also revisit your ageism. I'm all for encouraging young people, and OP seems a really bright 13 years old person, for sure. But try to keep condescension out of the way. As anybody with children can tell you, we all learn from them all the time. It's not something surprising.
Maybe don't throw -isms around so lightly, eh?
Actually, the comment in question would have been perfect encouragement in my view just by removing that phrase.
At work we built a BI tool around Scratch (Blockly) back in 2013. It’s still seeing daily use: https://www.dialogic.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/demo1.gif
Please post this gif as a show hn, so it gets some attention and maybe someone builds on top of this idea!
At work we built a BI tool around Scratch (Blockly) back in 2013. It’s still seeing daily use: https://www.dialogic.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/demo1.gif
This is genuinely amazing - I'd love to give it a try. Any chance any of the work your team put into it is open source?
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Maybe don't throw -isms around so lightly, eh?
I find hard to interpret "A 40 yo learned something from a 13 yo" in a non ageist way. Seems that people disagree, but nobody has provided a counterpoint. Actually, the comment in question would have been perfect encouragement in my view just by removing that phrase.