10 ms·

Text Is Keeping Kids from Coding

156 points by dyarosla 9y ago

zitterbewegung 9y ago
Scratch is another solution for this problem https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/
- cesnja 9y ago
  I don't think it is - after learning how to build things in Scratch, one still has to transition to a language with different syntax which is text-only. What was presented in this submission might just be the solution that helps reduce the anxiety of transitioning from icons to programming languages with text-based source code.
  - spacelizard 9y ago
    Scratch is intended for older children who already have a certain level of literacy. There is another product, ScratchJr, for younger children that uses an icon-based UI: http://scratchjr.org/ http://scratchjr.org/ The transition path between them is indeed what you described.
  - andybak 9y ago
    Blockly is based on Scratch and offers a transition path between visual and text-based programming. https://developers.google.com/blockly/ https://developers.google.com/blockly/
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  Scratch is just a really pretty syntax highlighter where you don't have to type. You still have walls of text. It's just pretty colors.
  - dTal 9y ago
    It's more than a syntax highlighter, it's a language where validity can be determined by static analysis, that prevents the programmer from making syntax errors in realtime. I think its potential as a serious tool is underrated.
    - throwaway2016a 9y ago
      Good point. I was referring more to it's benefits in relation to this article. I don't think it adds much value over what the original app being discussed here did. I think switching to icons adds more value in that context.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Honestly, I've got pretty mixed feelings about Scratch. It's a very cool initiative that helps make basic programming more accessible, and I value it as a way to show kids "hey, programming exists and can be fun!" But I've also had the misfortune of running events where kids use Scratch. These were 7th-9th graders who self-selected in, so up to a decade older than the target audience in this article. The results aren't exactly pretty, and they don't make me optimistic about giving Scratch to 5 year olds. Scratch seems to have two major problems: awkward control flow, and a gridless environment. - The first comes through as a large fraction of programs having broken or absurd loop and branch logic - often with a clear plan in mind, but terrible results. The difficulty of establishing hidden state encourages all sorts of ugly practices like handling a health bar by nesting the same code three times in conditionals to handle taking damage. - The second is that where SpriteBox uses grids to establish clear coordinate systems and touching/overlapping/separate states, Scratch uses a continuous field. It creates awkward and unintuitive collision results, adds a layer of unfriendly abstraction (what does "forward 200" actually mean?), and makes drag-and-drop initialization a touchy and miserable experience, even for adults. Overall, I think Scratch succeeds at reducing text, but fails to make abstraction and control feel approachable. It also introduces lots of novel headaches not present even in 'real' programming.
exelius 9y ago
All we're doing here is separating logic from syntax -- which totally makes sense. Ironically, a lot of business software development works like this (not that it should, just that it does). You have a bunch of BAs who churn out flow charts and hand them over in the form of requirements to developers who implement that logic via syntax.
ibn_ibid 9y ago
If you give your kids books, text isn't scary
- Insanity 9y ago
  If that held up, I wonder why (at least from the article) it seems that parents thought the same.
  - Xoros 9y ago
    I think it's because they think generally and not for just their own kids if they are already good readers/writers.
  - throwaway2016a 9y ago
    I think that sometimes parents "protect" their kids from complicated things. They underestimate what children are capable of.
- jccalhoun 9y ago
  I don't think what parents find scary is text but that programming is (for these parents) not text they comprehend. Now, there is an assumption with a book that kids will learn to read the language. Maybe parents should have the same attitude towards programming.
Clubber 9y ago
This is a really good idea, separating the logic from the syntax. I remember when I was learning database design and they taught us using Access, so we didn't get bogged down in the syntax. When I had to switch to Oracle professionally, I noticed I was constantly translating what I saw in Access to the PLSQL in Oracle. After a while, I just thought in PLSQL rather than Access. Something I've noticed all the years, teaching is HARD. Well, teaching effectively and efficiently is.
xigency 9y ago
I have a halfway decent solution to this problem. Currently, I'm working on a web-based game development language. Essentially, I would like to create a simple programming language, like BASIC, Lua, or others, and provide built-in libraries for 2D game making. Much of my formative programming experience was using using Blitz Basic, a game language. As a teenager, I was able to use it to create games easily. With all of the visual and graphical game development kits available today, I feel that it has become more difficult to learn programming in the way that I did. Providing a programming-based offering is the only solution, I think. When constructing functions and loops to coordinate and move or draw sprites, I think it becomes much easier to think about the logic of a computer program and how that knowledge can be practical.
- RepressedEmu 9y ago
  I think this is an amazing idea! I played with Basic and Visual Basic when I was younger and it taught me all about logic loops, basic data structures, etc. Putting that type of playground on the web sounds interesting. Have you started yet?
  - xigency 9y ago
    I'm working on porting the language VM to asynchronous JavaScript. The language that I'm using is one that I've shared with HN before, although I've made major changes and added some nice features. Here is the Duck source code: https://github.com/gregtour/duck-lang/tree/duck2 https://github.com/gregtour/duck-lang/tree/duck2 The documentation reflects the original version, but duck2.cfg shows the new grammar and the /js folder shows the current progress. I have a mockup of the interface here as well: http://brainplex.net/gamepad/ http://brainplex.net/gamepad/ One big issue is finding time.
mjw1007 9y ago
Context: they're working on something aimed at children no older than 8.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  Why do children under 8 need to know how to code? They don't even have simple things like cause and effect established in their brain until they're about 11. I.e. "if it's raining outside I should wear a rain coat or I'll get wet". Nor do they have much logical reasoning capability. That's also why they don't get sarcasm. Edit: paper on pre-adolescent and adolescent brain development, especially as it relates to cause and effect and abstract reasoning: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929314000516 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929314...
  - jkaunisv1 9y ago
    You have a really weird idea of what an 11 year old is capable of.
    - DanBC 9y ago
      Prefrontal cortex is still developing in 11 year olds which means they're not great at understanding consequences of actions or making complex future plans.
      - vidarh 9y ago
        But most of them are certainly capable of making the evaluation used as an example above.
        xigency 9y ago
        Not to be the "prodigy" kid, but I began game programming at 10 years old because I wanted to know how games worked. I tried to buy a Visual Basic 5 book from Borders before my parents gave me "Beginning Programming for Dummies" instead. Not sure why these people don't believe that Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts can't tell the weather.
Xoros 9y ago
I don't know for US, but here, in France, children start to really learn to read at school after preschool, around 6-7 yo. Some succeed, some have difficulties to achieve. Of course they start learning concepts in preschool, but it's not an obligation to put your kids in preschool (most parents do, but you don't have to) So isn't it a problem with text, reading, words... than a specific code problem ? As a parent, I'm going to teach coding to my kids, starting next year, they'll be 8 yo. I'll start with scratch then probably some python. And I'm lucky my kids are both fluent readers. But I'll still start with scratch.
- hacker_9 9y ago
  The problem isn't reading ability, it's the rigid structure of words that confuses them (this happens at any age range). What is or isn't allowed? Grammar rules are invisible at the end of the day and to be honest what does 'move(.left)' signify? Even after 15 years as a programmer I find this grammar confusing, is it shorthand for 'this.left'? shorthand for an enum? I'm even wondering if this grammar is even useful, if it doesn't look anything like languages in commercial use. Using icons makes a lot more sense, as they are immediately recognizable pictures that come with the expectation of no structure to learn, and it looks like from the article they just simply put one icon after another in a list.
hzhou321 9y ago
Text is scary. They had the same barrier transition from picture books to books without pictures. It takes kindergarten where the set up of school give them the perception that they had no choice but to embrace the initial difficulty opened the door of wonder for them. I don't see much difference teaching them programming with a real programming language. They have to be forced to embrace it first.
- kbsletten 9y ago
  Well, to be fair programming is (currently, at least) an optional skill competing with soccer, guitar, and video games for mind space. Reading is the lowest bar for practically everything in modern life so there's more tolerance for sub-optimal teaching since we all are willing to hold feet to fire. Until coding is as ubiquitous as reading, we're going to have to do better.
Adamantcheese 9y ago
I wonder if it isn't the text that's putting parents off, but the specific lesser used symbols like parentheses and the such. For that same reason I believe parents think that math is hard in comparison to writing, due to the large amount of domain specific iconography. I also wonder what effect leetspeak might have on bridging that gap, even though it's probably not the best solution.
- csallen 9y ago
  I wondered the exact same thing. Having parentheses, periods, etc in seemingly-arbitrary positions looks complicated, at least in part because they are not self-explanatory. They tried "move(.up)", but did they try "move up"?
- mysterydip 9y ago
  That's a good point, and one reason I enjoyed BASIC and its dialects so much. Which is easier to explain to a new programmer: For i = 1 to 10 Or For (i = 1; i <= 10; i++) Once you understand how things work, translating that knowledge to another language and adding on concepts is relatively easy.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    I still to this day, after about 30 years of exposure to C, 22 years of professional development, and many years of using C professionally, avoid the for() look in C because I struggle to remember which position the comparison vs. increment goes. I prefer to use while() loops. But I still remember the BASIC syntax you demonstrate above, 30+ years after I last programmed BASIC.
    - DiThi 9y ago
      > because I struggle to remember which position the comparison vs. increment goes Tip: they're in the same order they're used: comparison is always run at the beginning of each iteration, and increment is always done at the end. for(init; cond; last) ... init; while(cond) { ... ; last;} But I also dislike it and love "for ... in" constructs.
avaer 9y ago
I actually don't know any great coders that learned to code through these kinds of games. They might move the programming-is-interesting gradient, but I don't think the hard part about learning to code is the text. The hard part about coding is the problems that aren't in the code. Doing research, setting up environments, understanding platforms, dealing with crashes, dealing with crappy tools, debugging, understanding other people's code. None of this is taught by isolated sandbox games like this. Sandbox games might teach some very useful analytical skills, but it's pretty far from coding. The only thing you really need to get kids coding is to give them the tools needed to do interesting naughty things. Many of the programmers I know learned to code at an early age by hacking games to cheat against their friends. Reading text was never, ever a problem, but the disillusionment of finding out that coding doesn't involve pretty foolproof user interfaces might have been.
- celim307 9y ago
  Yes, this. Number one thing that will flatline my love for learning a new language is setting up the environment. When I'm 10 pages deep into stackoverflow search results trying to fix an obtuse package's error code, I'm close to giving up.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    I'd say in general, the biggest problem with most tools is that installation on average tends to require too much effort. People experienced with the tools don't tend to work on fixing that because it's a solved problem for them. But the number of tools I've rejected because I was not yet convinced it'd be useful and so was unwilling to invest the time in getting them working is huge.
  - default-kramer 9y ago
    Every time I do this, I wonder how any beginner ever gets their environment set up. Because as soon as something goes wrong (which happens more often than not), I'm drawing on years of experience that the beginner won't have. My first was C++ on Windows 95 and luckily we had internet at the time - it still took me multiple days before I got Hello World working. I think browser-based language introductions are great. They remove a huge obstacle and get you into the language right away.
bitL 9y ago
I think it's due to only 10% of humans primarily thinking in text/sound, whereas 40% are visual and 50% are emotional. This was exploited in e.g. Harry Potter books. I think we are due visually or voice-driven development environments that should be now possible with Deep Learning, even if initially a bit cranky.
jaequery 9y ago
if i had learned to code using those graphical things when i was growing up, i probably woupd not have become a coder. wheres the joy and fun in it? looks laborius and boring to me.
hartator 9y ago
I was playing this kind of games when I was a kid. More like a puzzle than coding though. Kids who want to learn how to code should just do it with regular tooling. You don't need any special approach.
andybak 9y ago
> From our perspective, we’d simplified the code to what looks like plain English. How do they square that with the presence of parentheses and the use of a syntactically significant period? It seems strange they didn’t start with something that looked more like Logo before concluding the text was inherently off-putting. I’m not sure their conclusion was wrong — but I’m confused about the point where they gave up with text. Also - the final syntax at the end is ugly as hell. Is that the best they can do? Finally - not even a hat-tip to Scratch/Blockly? If they aren't aware of it then it's very odd. If they are and decided not to mention it - I find that equally odd.
honoredb 9y ago
Cool! I feel like you could go further and let the student control the transfer to text. Give all the built-in functions both icons and names, and let student-defined functions be icons they create if they want. The point where it's less cognitive load to use text is going to be different for different students, so let text-based coding be a tool they discover, not a requirement imposed on them.
jrimbault 9y ago
I routinely send large text files to people around me, I noticed many people just refuse to read pure text. So I convert the text to pdf and add some flavor, pictures etc. Then people read it. edit: by "large" I mean, by my standards, ridiculously small, like 300 to 3000 words top, but people are scared by simple text.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
  It could be a layout thing too. White space magically helps sometimes.
5trokerac3 9y ago
> Problem is, many newcomers, kids and adults alike, believe that code is inherently complex simply because it looks complex. But it is complex. Anything beyond the most basic examples delve into the concepts of calculus. If we don't expect most children to comprehend advanced mathematics until they're teenagers, why would we expect most of them to grasp anything but the most basic conditional logic until then. That's not to say that we shouldn't attempt to teach children coding at a young age, but the idea that anyone but a few would understand genuine coding at the same developmental period where they're learning to spell "dog" and to add 2+2 is a bit ridiculous. I wonder if the authors consulted a child psychologist before beginning their endeavor.
- savanaly 9y ago
  >But it is complex. Anything beyond the most basic examples delve into the concepts of calculus. Huh? My codebases at work have never involved calculus. Not all programming proceeds along the lines of Project Euler when getting more complex.
  - 5trokerac3 9y ago
    The very concept of functions is calculus. Kids are in their teens before we even have them solving x=y algebra.
    - savanaly 9y ago
      Maybe we're working from different definitions of "calculus". To me, equations and relations between variables are not calculus, just algebra. Only when you start studying the infinitesimals of change does it start to count as calculus. I don't have any derivatives or integrals in my programs, and very few do.
      - carapace 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_calculus maybe?
NikolaeVarius 9y ago
Why is is this a problem? - Numbers are keeping kids from learning math. - Text is keeping kids from reading. - Too many words are keeping kids from listening to lectures. I don't understand why people find it difficult to just teach a kid how to do something rather than wait for some miracle solution.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
  I offer my miracle solution: text is a bunch of tiny pictures.
  - kps 9y ago
    Text started as tiny pictures. Trouble is, there's an unbounded amount of things you need pictures for. The great thing about phonetically-based writing is that a tractably small number of symbols can combine in a natural way to express anything.
- fulafel 9y ago
  That numbers idea has been held by a lot of smart people. For a while some countries taught set theory before numbers.
rb808 9y ago
I dont understand why elementary school kids need to code at all. Most of the developers my age didn't even see a computer until high school or college and they're great developers. A great preparation they should learn some math or ideally be having fun with their friends, running around outside or perhaps art or something creative.
- iamatworknow 9y ago
  I feel like this needs to be higher up. While of course any parent would want their child to meet and exceed any academic standards you or the school system set, childhood is the only time in your life where you're relatively free to make mistakes with friends and relationships, and that's how you learn to be a better person. It's a lot more difficult to learn that later in life than programming, in my opinion as someone who didn't start coding until he was in his early 20's but still struggles with relationships because of a unrelated, intense academic focus as a child.
- trendroid 9y ago
  >A great preparation they should learn some math or ideally be having fun with their friends, running around outside or perhaps art or something creative. Not sure why there is a dichotomy between this and playing a game on phone for 30 minutes to learn coding.
ankitrohatgi 9y ago
I had an excellent math education growing up (not in US) so programming did not seem intimidating to any of us as it looked a lot like math. For me the main motivation to code was to have my computer do the math and physics I was learning in school. US parents and teachers really need to push for better math skills rather than run away from it.
NumberSix 9y ago
IMHO the more likely explanation for these results is that the human visual system has built in mathematical, logical capabilities actually far beyond advanced college math. These are used to identify and track objects at a very early age. It is much easier to access these abilities using pictures and icons. Text is an additional layer of abstraction probably involving language and communication systems outside the human visual system. The text is a label or abstraction for the visually represented concepts which must be encountered and learned first. There is a consistent pattern in learning mathematics and other technical areas that most students learn better and faster with pictures and concrete examples. Abstraction comes later.
thanatropism 9y ago
I thought this would be "kids are texting rather than messing with their computers".
Froyoh 9y ago
I wonder what it's like growing up in today's world learning to code... Very different from how I was introduced to coding.
wiremine 9y ago
I'm the dad of an 11 year old boy and a 8 year old girl. Text IS scary, because it's nontrivial. There's a reason schools start with the ABCs and spend the first four years of school teaching kids to read. And even then we don't stop there: middle school focuses on grammar, and high school focuses on creating long-form content. Programming is similar: it's non trivial to stand up a knowledge base to be a programmer. I think the big difference is that most programming classes start in high school or college, well after we've mastered text in general. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. The key is to start small: don't expect novel-sized programs, expect words and sentences, and make those words and sentences FUN. For example, my son has had a TON of fun with the micro:bit [1], and it's scratch based system, and Swift playgrounds. [1] [1] http://microbit.org/ http://microbit.org/ [2] https://developer.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ https://developer.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/
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Zigurd 9y ago
If software had started in China, we would not have these problems. There would be an ideogram for each operator or keyword. For one thing, the equals sign wouldn't be misused as an assignment operator.
dTal 9y ago
Lack of human factors knowledge in people who write software tools is keeping kids from coding. And adults, for that matter. There's a huge amount of incidental complexity and fragility that we just tolerate. I mean, how does move(.up) look like plain English? What's wrong with "move up"? Are we really so blind as to not realise that any normal person looking at that is going to get the strong impression they don't know what the hell is going on? Hell, I don't know what's going on. What's with the period? What happens if I don't type it? Fragile and incidentally complex. Now to be fair there are intrinsic differences between typing in a blank text box and dragging and dropping icons. You can type anything in a text box, while icons present a limited selection. This hurts discoverability, which is why the author saw better results when they gradually swapped out the icons for text. Dragging and dropping is an atomic transaction which can be cancelled with good feedback if the user attempts something invalid; this is not quite so easy with typing, because valid code must be reached through invalid states on a letter-by-letter basis. But proper coding in a Turing-complete sense (which none of the games seem to offer) involves defining your own symbols and wrestling with abstract notions like iteration that lend themselves increasingly badly to representation in sprite form. Scratch is a good example of a system that attempts to use the best of both worlds - its building blocks are text-based, but selectable from a limited number, atomically placed, and statically checked to practically preclude syntax errors. Text itself isn't intrinsically bad. Lastly - it's a shame the industry moved on from BASIC. Programming was never more accessible than when the average personal computer booted to a REPL of a standardized, easy-to-use language.
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MisterBastahrd 9y ago
Are you a coder if you don't understand what syntax is? We used LOGO when I was a kid, and for good reason. It had a limited syntax for classroom use and gave you instant visual gratification. Sometimes I wonder if being limited to text adventures when I was really young was a benefit. If I typed something that the computer didn't understand, it told me so. It forced me to have patience and to learn to look up the right way to ask for something.
pjmlp 9y ago
Text didn't prevent me to learn Timex 2068 Basic and Z80 Assembly at the age of 10. What I would concede is that we had fun books to learn from, like these ones for the Atari http://www.atariarchives.org/ http://www.atariarchives.org/.
otterpro 9y ago
I definitely agree that text is very intimidating, no matter how well it is represented, compounded by inclusion of numbers and punctuation like (, ), ;,. +,-,<,>, etc. Another is that we no longer have the text-based interface in things that we use. In the classic computing era, text games like "Zork" were popular, and even DOS and *nix text shells were the norm. Even adventure games like Sierra Online games had graphic view but had text interface. Perhaps text-based user interface could lessen the anxiety of text in coding, but I think that we no longer value text UI. Instead, everything is GUI now, with touch-interface on iOS/Android in the mix - and perhaps someday, we no longer will have mouse/keyboard, but rather just verbal and physical interface. By then, we can program things using complex language such as "I'd like to move the yellow box sprite on top of the tree to the left about 50 pixels", then programming code becomes more approachable to average human. We are already on our way, with Alexa and Siri.
wikwocket 9y ago
There was some great prior discussion of the topic of kids, text, and coding in a thread about Scratch 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274249
steego 9y ago
Good article. I hope this article inspires more people to come up with clever solutions that help bridge the gap with kids and coding. It's easy for most of us to discount the barriers of syntax because it's so familiar to us, but try to remember this: People consistently fail PEDMAS tests online. That's a trivial syntax. I like their approach to transitioning from an icon/diagram approach to a text approach. It highlights that text and iconic/diagram representations don't have to be a false dichotomy. These two ideas can complement each other if done carefully. If there's one thing I'd love for every person who aspires to create a visual development environment is this: Visual representations should be used to enhance and project program structure, not to replace text altogether. Much in the same way that the CoffeeScript --> JavaScript translation page illuminates the language, I believe we should be projecting our text languages into various clear visual representations. Having been made to suffer through a few Enterprise Integration Tools (BizTalk, MuleSoft) that take a diagram first approach, I concluded they would be much better served if they took a text-first DSL approach that is isomorphic with a diagram representation. By binding the two at the hip, working with the diagram based UI would visually teach the user's understanding of the DSL syntax. In the other direction, playing with the text interface could instantly reveal how the parser is interpreting the intent of the program. Again, I'd love to see more people take perspectives past the usual false dichotomies and start researching how different approaches can complement each other rather than compete for attention and mindshare.
21 9y ago
Are 5 year olds expected to read these days? I learned it at 7-8.
- hathawsh 9y ago
  I remember getting frustrated with my kindergarten teacher because she insisted that the letters "T-H-E" spelled a familiar word, yet the word has no T sound, H sound, or E sound. What a garbage language, I thought. So yeah, I'd say kids start to learn to read at 5 or earlier.
crikli 9y ago
I started my professional life as a stockbroker and I remember my mentor saying "Money Magazine does not exist to advise individuals to make great trading decisions, it exists to sell copies of Money Magazine." I've since applied this logic fairly universally and I'm going to apply it here: SpriteBox does not exist to teach kids to be great coders, it exists to sell copies of SpriteBox. The challenge of text undoubtedly is a blocker to the sales of SpriteBox. I do not believe that it is a blocker to a kid becoming a great coder. Coding absolutely requires a high level of comfort with abstraction. It requires the ability to mentally model abstractions, maintain relationships between abstractions, and make a (sorta) concrete reality of those abstractions. Coders must be able to make intuitive mental leaps based on disparate and distributed data. Often the solutions that coders come up with are based on little bits and pieces of the puzzle based on SO answers, documentation, blog posts, example code found on github, etc. The solutions to tough problems are rarely found in a single neat all-explaining resource. So... if a kid is having trouble with text I would candidly posit that the kid may not have the ability to deal with abstraction that coding requires. Not a problem for the industry as there are already enough coders who have this issue, but it creates a sales problem for SpriteBox. EDIT: typo, clarity
- hasenj 9y ago
  This. But also the problem with the OP is they seem to show people samples of a programming language without any explanation, expecting them to intuitively figure out the syntax and semantics. There's no way this won't be confusing.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  As someone who's grown up with computers, I think the biggest difference I see between ”technical” and “non-technical” people is a willingness to try things out and not be put off by intimidating new things. If you are willing to explore you will eventually figure it out, but if you are afraid you'll never get anywhere.
- dyarosla 9y ago
  OP here. You're right that SpriteBox does not exist to teach kids to be great coders. It exists to get as many kids as possible engaged with what programming is and excited to learn more. Especially kids who may not be 'naturally inclined' to code. What makes your argument fall flat is, we already had LightBot: it teaches kids to program with icons only. If text was a blocker for SpriteBox, why would we pursue it at all? You end by saying that kids who fear text are not well suited for coding. That's like saying kids who fear symbols are not well suited to math. This kind of sentiment is what drives people to believe that they should give up things that they may excel at given enough time and interest. SpriteBox, like many coding apps, is about sparking that interest. As for text, the real reason we tackle that is because there's a real gap for people between icons and textual programming: some people have this disconnect between what they perceive coding is. Is visual coding "real"? Are formulas in excel "coding"? These are answers programmers can answer, but not people unfamiliar with code.
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jlebrech 9y ago
I learnt to code with logo, and that was text based. why are we trying to force kids to learn how computers till they are interested in it. They should be learning to ride bikes or climb trees. what we lack in the computing world are games they can make by following a book, eventually they'll want to diverge from what's in the book and make their own stuff, the problem is no games are too complex and a simple game might not hold their attention. Something like Mario Maker is where they probably should start but the extra options to change variables and access scripts later on.
sevensor 9y ago
There's a discussion of this on the Bootstrap blog: http://www.bootstrapworld.org/blog/blocks/Block-Getting-Started.shtml http://www.bootstrapworld.org/blog/blocks/Block-Getting-Star.... (That's Bootstrap, the teach-scheme-to-middle-school-children project, not Bootstrap the JS library.) They've tried it both ways. I'll quote their bullet points: > Things we love about blocks > 1. Blocks lower the barrier for entry > 2. Less frustration > 3. Useful hints > 4. Visual reinforcement of structure > Things we don't love about blocks > 1. Penalizes fast typers > 2. Higher demand on short-term memory > 3. Small space of visual cues > 4. Poor Accessibility They go into detail on each of these.
Jtsummers 9y ago
Your text notation was: move(.up) What does the `.` do? Why can't it just be: move(up) What purpose do the parentheses have? Are they essential or optional? Why not: move up Ok, you wanted it to be like a "real" language, I guess? Look at Logo and Basic. They largely eschewed punctuation (not entirely) for text and newlines and meaningful names: pen down forward 100 right 90 forward 50 pen up
- superplussed 9y ago
  I thought the same thing when I saw this.
- hasenj 9y ago
  Arbitrary syntax rules. Why would they be surprised that people find it confusing?
- deleted 9y ago
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- masklinn 9y ago
  > What does the `.` do? Why can't it just be: > move(up) One of the latter pictures shows "swift syntax", so I expect that's that: .up is a shortcut for a variant in a sum type, as it is in Swift.
  - Jtsummers 9y ago
    Not knowing Swift, I would've guessed something similar. But that hardly makes it a suitable language to dump on kids. For an educational language, you need to start off small with intuitively sensible constructs, and build up. You can move towards that syntax, but you can hardly start there. EDIT: Actually, I'm going to make a stronger statement. You shouldn't make an educational video game, and particularly an educational programming game, until you've read Mindstorms and learned what Papert and others studied last century.
- dyarosla 9y ago
  OP here. So yes, we could have gone the "move up" route. In fact, we did at one point! Even then though, icons were far and away less intimidating. The problem is, real programming languages don't eschew punctuation, Logo included (once you include loops and such). AND our primary goal was to get kids familiar with reading real looking code (in this case, Swift). The last option would be to start with "move up"s, and then introduce punctuation later... but then players would get confused as to why punctuation, unneeded before, suddenly becomes required? Finding the middle ground of jumping from icons to textual code (with punctuation) resolved all of these issues best. And yes, we've read Mindstorms ;)
deleted 9y ago
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otakucode 9y ago
I learned to code when I was 9 years old. It was in text. No one helped me. I found a couple books with my parents computer, 'Introduction to BASIC' and understood that if I learned what was in the book, I could make the computer do what I wanted. I don't know programming was supposed to be hard. I didn't know some adults did it as a job. I just knew that if I learned what was in the books, I could do stuff. So I started reading, and I never ran into anything that was beyond my grasp. I do recall reading one part that said a person who did not draw a flowchart before writing a program was either a genius or a fool and resolved to be a genius (hey I was 9). Not even refusing to create flowcharts prevented me. I feel in love the day I wrote: 10 PRINT "I LOVE YOU MOM" 20 GOTO 10 And filled the screen then called my mom into the room to look at it. Text is not keeping kids from coding. Adults are. Adults making kids think it's difficult, adults standing in the way and shuttering them into unnecessarily dumbed down environments, standing over their shoulder and making sure they don't do anything inappropriate, etc. But more than anything, adults filling kids free time and never giving them the opportunity to just sit down, have a quiet few hours, and figure things out.
- szatkus 9y ago
  "we got responses that estimated ages 9, 10 and up- " The point is text looks too complex for younger kids. 5 year old won't sit down for a few hours and figure out things. He will just get bored.
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    Other than sales of this app, why is it necessary for 5 year olds to be programming?
    - szatkus 9y ago
      Maybe because their parents want them to. It's like dads teaching their kids how to use tools and fix things. Something they find enjoyable and useful, want to learn their children to have something in common. But probably they just read somewhere that programming is the future.
    - 9y ago
githubber123 9y ago
And yet I hate game engine visual programming, whatever you call connecting those boxes together. I started out thinking the windows commands were doing something cool and then wanted to make games so i asked my parents for the Dark Basic software set and began moving images around that shoot sprites I drew. From there I asked for a Borland C book that came with a compiler and then jumped into web design a bit. That was about 20 years ago for me and now I'm a system admin and reverse engineering/making whatever I can on the side.
brandonmenc 9y ago
Didn't Alan Kay and team get a bunch of elementary school-aged children - who had probably never even seen a computer before, since this was in the 70s - programming in Smalltalk?
- scroot 9y ago
  Yes. Not only that, but by observing the kids they iterated on different versions of Smalltalk. The approach there was quite different from what you see today. They built upon actual psychology and spent the money and time conducting studies. From that we got things like GUI, OO, etc. When you see Kay harping on about the dismal state of affairs today, I think it's that he sees this constant pedantic bickering about static vs dynamic typing and all the rest as meddling around in the complexity of things that should be irrelevant. To the point of the original post, it's also worth noting that Smalltalks were not just text environments, and that while yes much of the code was written in text, these kids were not writing text files that they then compiled/interpreted using their PDP Terminal emulation programs. They were doing everything in the live environment itself. Considering the existence of things like Smalltalk and Hypercard, whenever some uber programming expert tells you this-or-that reason we cannot have such systems in wide use today, it's akin to saying: "See all this great stuff we used to have? We can't have it anymore"
- scroot 9y ago
  Here is one of the relevant portions of Kay's documentary, which was recorded years later: https://youtu.be/p2LZLYcu_JY?t=35m21s https://youtu.be/p2LZLYcu_JY?t=35m21s
cordite 9y ago
I was at a conference lately. After one talk, the presenter talked about his experiences with his children presenting how to code and teach other children. He commented that one of the biggest barriers he saw in his own children is that it took them so long to type out the ideas they have in their head. It requires immense focus to retain what to do next.
MarcScott 9y ago
I took a break from teaching for a year, to be a 3D graphic artist, using Cinema 4D. The software had a drag and drop, node based, coding environment called Xpresso, that I became quite adept at using. I can remember showing it to my programmer brother, and he told me if I liked using Xpresso I should try a proper language. I dismissed him, saying that typing text held no appeal for me. A couple of years later, and I was back teaching ICT and the curriculum was being axed, in favour of Computer Science, so I decided to teach myself a little Python, and ended up being a secondary CS teacher in a fairly elite school. What strikes me now, is at no point did I make a connection between the graphical language I was using back then and the text based languages I would go on to use later. In hindsight it seems obvious that if I enjoyed controlling pixels on a screen with blocks, I would probably enjoy doing it with text. It's anecdotal, but it has turned out to be true. In my professional capacity as an educator, I have seen how engaged young students can be with graphical languages such as Scratch, and how those same students eventually want the power and control of more powerful languages. These types of games don't teach everyone how to code, but they do awaken a desire to control and manipulate computers, in people who might otherwise never have realised this ambition. For people who say that the hard part of programming is "not in the text", watch a seven year old try to control a turtle in Scratch and then watch them try to do the same thing in Python. Typing speed is a major factor, as is understanding the importance of case and white space. Not to mention the symbol nightmare of commas, full stops, colons, semi-colons, single and double quotes, hyphens, underscores, equals and double-equals, square braces, curly braces, angle braces, and parenthesis.
- gasbag 9y ago
  You might be interested in the Luna programming language/dev environment. It's designed to have a 1:1 correspondence between the visual, node-based environment and the written forms of the code. I haven't been able to try it yet since it's still in closed alpha, but it looks very intriguing! Given your experience with a similar visual language and later interest in more conventional programming, you could make a good case for getting into the alpha. There's a signup form on their site (one for the alpha and one for their newsletter, depending on your level of interest). http://www.luna-lang.org/ http://www.luna-lang.org/ Last HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14612680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14612680
Bjorkbat 9y ago
The title makes me cringe a little. It implies the text-based nature of most programming languages is a problem, even THE problem. It is, if you're trying to simply get young kids to use <insert language here>, vs get them to use said languages to interesting problems. The problem as I see it is that parents across the country are trying to prepare their children for a job landscape which may change radically between now and when they graduate high school by getting them while they're young and attempting to introduce them to coding as early as 3. Not programming, not learning how to solve problems with an algorithmic mindset. Coding. As in getting them comfortable with slinging around functions that build a website using magic. Really, we should be teaching them to do the thing that we're trying to do with programming languages in the first place, which is solve problems with an algorithmic mindset. I think SpriteBox gets it, kinda, where it falls short is that in the end they're still hung up by the whole "let's teach kids how to code" trap and gradually replace the icons with text and do this weird thing where icons are indented because text-based code is indented. In the end kids know how these languages work, and how to do simple things with them, but they've learned all of this within the context of what looks like a platforming game. Extending this to the act of creating something is different. If you really want to teach kids how to program, create an environment that teaches them how to build and create something cool using a few simple and easy to understand rules. Allow them to experiment with the rules to see what happens. Make it so that the upper threshold for how you can bend the rules, combine rules, etc, is to all concerned essentially non-existent. Enable and reward creativity, which is something a lot of "coding" games and toys and whatever simply don't do. They enable and reward you to help a cute robot walk in a damn line.
- yorwba 9y ago
  My gateway drugs into programming were AutoIt (https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/ https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/) and Ren'Py (https://renpy.org/ https://renpy.org/). AutoIt lets you control the mouse, simulate keyboard input and so on. It was pretty fun as a kid to make a "can't press this button" game and watch others try to beat it. There wer also bindings to various Windows APIs, which I used to build GUI solvers for my math homework. Ren'Py is a framework for creating visual novels, and I made one that mocked the vocabulary tests by having each choice be a pun on bastardized French or a running gag in my French class. I think pretty much everyone in that class played it at some point. My point being, there are tools out there with a special-purpose scripting language used by content creators who might themselves not be expert programmers, and I if you let kids play around with that they will probably build something they find fun without anyone telling them to do so.
payne92 9y ago
> We showed the above to playtesters (kids and parents) who told > us what we didn’t want to hear: the game looks complicated. That's because real programming is complicated. Software systems, with billions or even trillions of switch points, are the most complex things humans have ever built, by far. We have tried mightily, for many, many decades, to make programming simpler and more accessible. The problem: instructing a computer precisely and unambiguously what to do means you have to precisely and unambiguously specify...what to do! There's no getting around it, just like there's no way (yet) to write a novel without choosing words and pushing letter keys. The graphic approaches quickly get tedious beyond toy examples. Graphs are fine for telling your Lego robot what to do, but with the Web and app store overflowing with cool apps, the bar for grabbing and keeping a would-be programmer's attention is now quite high. My bet: non-programmers will "program" at scale when where's a fundamentally new computing model. Machine learning & deep learning are the most promising for this, I think: instead of telling the machine precisely what to do (and how), you show examples of the behavior you want and give feedback when it's wrong.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  > The graphic approaches quickly get tedious beyond toy examples. The things I have seen created in LabVIEW would absolutely astound you - not just in their complexity, but in the fact that they work at all (for various values of "work"), and that someone somewhere out there is able to maintain them without going insane. /then again, maybe there are more insane LabVIEW developers than I know...
lostcolony 9y ago
Umm...where's the research on the efficacy of the change on how skilled the kid becomes at programming? All I see is they self-assessed that it was easier with pictures, and they were engaged longer. Great. But DID THEY LEARN TO CODE BETTER? The algebra comparison is telling; "a study was done that showed that 92.9% of kids using the app achieved mastery of basic algebra after 1.5 hours of play" - where's the similar comparison? And, how do we measure 'mastery'? Because the mathematical lexicon requires numbers, not pictures, and coding non-trivial things are done with languages that are text, not pictures, the way we test that is also important. Note that fundamentally I agree with their conclusion that, pursuant to being marketable, they HAVE to use pictures, because people's impressions matter. But in terms of actual benefit, I'd want to know more details.
- wikwocket 9y ago
  They did not do hard research, since they are still designing their game, but they did present it to playtesters. I think this is an appropriate level of diligence for a product early in the design phase, it's the equivalent of the "hallway usability testing" recommended for agile teams. It may be impossible to say right now whether this change helps kids get better at programming faster, but presumably, more kids will play a game that they feel is more approachable, similar to how the playtesters responded.
  - lostcolony 9y ago
    Like I said, I don't fault their methods for what they're optimizing for: sales. I -do- fault them for implying that it will improve coding skills when they never tested for that.
kazinator 9y ago
The kids they are working with are in an age group in which some children are just beginning to read. Yes, text is a problem if you're not yet literate.
a-nikolaev 9y ago
By starting with icons first, you intuitively teach the idea of tokenization of the program code. This idea is important, but trivially simple to an experienced programmer so easily dismissed. It is not that obvious to a beginner tho.
sebow 9y ago
Really? Are we gonna complain that 5 years old kids won't learn "coding" because of text? Let them be kids, at least till like 10 or something when they actually get interested in technology, kids at this age should "master" human interaction, not be deprived about it.That's why they complain about text and love images/audio/etc, because they "started" using their senses and they like having them stimulated. I'm kind of "hypocritical" here since i kind of did those aswell when i was very young,but it was from personal interest,I wasn't forced/guided to it(more like the contrary really),it sparked in my own mind. Pushing people in STEM/or tech to be more specific, specially from ages like these ones is very questionable at best, and the best argument against it is the health factor in, let them develop their bodies firstly before they start getting interested with their brains.(if at all)
cr0sh 9y ago
I can't comment too much on this, except to say that it did cause me to recall something from my early childhood. I remembered that in the first grade of elementary school, when I was 6 years old, that we used these workbooks with tear out pages to do these "math" problems. Simple addition and subtraction, IIRC. But these workbooks didn't use numbers and symbols; instead quantities were shown by fixed objects (like coins, or other images), symbols were replaced by something else, but I don't recall exactly what (maybe simple words - so not completely "text free"). On a different note - a few years ago my wife asked me to look over a friend's child's homework, to try to figure out how to do the problems, and what the answers were, because her child was having problems doing the homework, and neither she nor my wife could figure it out (neither are very math fluent). I looked at it - and at first it was "gibberish". There were some "standard" symbols for multiplication and addition, subtraction and the like. But everything else was symbols. Like, there'd be a problem that visually was something like "circle + ? = triangle" or "2 square + 3 triangle = ?" (I may be mis-remembering things, too). It was very confusing, but fortunately the worksheet (which was all I had) had a couple of "example problems" and their solutions included. I studied things for a bit, then it dawned on me: It was algebra - but it was being taught with symbols instead of numbers, and the solution (and how to arrive at it) was pretty simple to understand, once this was realized. In short, numbers are symbols (hey, I'm not a big math whiz myself - I know just enough to blow my foot off) - so it made sense that swapping these out wasn't that big of a deal, provided you had some base knowledge about the rules (which were provided by the examples). I was able to figure the problems out, then write down how things worked for her (and her child) to read and understand. AFAIK, the homework was completed and turned in with correct answers. At the time, her child was probably in the 4th or 5th grade, and it was interesting to me that the school was using such a system to teach algebra at an earlier age than what I recall having learned it (my first real algebra class wasn't until 7th grade, though in elementary school in 5th and 6th grades we had been doing some of the basics beforehand - I guess for "prep" for the coming years). So, in the case of coding, I can see how this idea of starting with "abstract icons" (somewhat) to represent certain coding statements and ideas - and gradually phasing in text - seems like something that should work (and they seem to prove that it does, too). Oh - another early example from when I was younger; arguably I first started to "program" when I got my first programmable toy - a Milton Bradley Big Trak. It's keypad used mostly symbols (plus some numbers) - but had other symbols for other actions...hmm.
cutler 9y ago
Kids learn to read music at school so why should learning to code be any easier? Skills have to be learned. Simple as that.

156 points by dyarosla 9y ago

zitterbewegung 9y ago

Scratch is another solution for this problem https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/

cesnja 9y ago
I don't think it is - after learning how to build things in Scratch, one still has to transition to a language with different syntax which is text-only. What was presented in this submission might just be the solution that helps reduce the anxiety of transitioning from icons to programming languages with text-based source code.
- spacelizard 9y ago
  Scratch is intended for older children who already have a certain level of literacy. There is another product, ScratchJr, for younger children that uses an icon-based UI: http://scratchjr.org/ http://scratchjr.org/ The transition path between them is indeed what you described.
- andybak 9y ago
  Blockly is based on Scratch and offers a transition path between visual and text-based programming. https://developers.google.com/blockly/ https://developers.google.com/blockly/
throwaway2016a 9y ago
Scratch is just a really pretty syntax highlighter where you don't have to type. You still have walls of text. It's just pretty colors.
- dTal 9y ago
  It's more than a syntax highlighter, it's a language where validity can be determined by static analysis, that prevents the programmer from making syntax errors in realtime. I think its potential as a serious tool is underrated.
  - throwaway2016a 9y ago
    Good point. I was referring more to it's benefits in relation to this article. I don't think it adds much value over what the original app being discussed here did. I think switching to icons adds more value in that context.
Bartweiss 9y ago
Honestly, I've got pretty mixed feelings about Scratch. It's a very cool initiative that helps make basic programming more accessible, and I value it as a way to show kids "hey, programming exists and can be fun!" But I've also had the misfortune of running events where kids use Scratch. These were 7th-9th graders who self-selected in, so up to a decade older than the target audience in this article. The results aren't exactly pretty, and they don't make me optimistic about giving Scratch to 5 year olds. Scratch seems to have two major problems: awkward control flow, and a gridless environment. - The first comes through as a large fraction of programs having broken or absurd loop and branch logic - often with a clear plan in mind, but terrible results. The difficulty of establishing hidden state encourages all sorts of ugly practices like handling a health bar by nesting the same code three times in conditionals to handle taking damage. - The second is that where SpriteBox uses grids to establish clear coordinate systems and touching/overlapping/separate states, Scratch uses a continuous field. It creates awkward and unintuitive collision results, adds a layer of unfriendly abstraction (what does "forward 200" actually mean?), and makes drag-and-drop initialization a touchy and miserable experience, even for adults. Overall, I think Scratch succeeds at reducing text, but fails to make abstraction and control feel approachable. It also introduces lots of novel headaches not present even in 'real' programming.

exelius 9y ago

All we're doing here is separating logic from syntax -- which totally makes sense. Ironically, a lot of business software development works like this (not that it should, just that it does). You have a bunch of BAs who churn out flow charts and hand them over in the form of requirements to developers who implement that logic via syntax.

ibn_ibid 9y ago

If you give your kids books, text isn't scary

Insanity 9y ago
If that held up, I wonder why (at least from the article) it seems that parents thought the same.
- Xoros 9y ago
  I think it's because they think generally and not for just their own kids if they are already good readers/writers.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  I think that sometimes parents "protect" their kids from complicated things. They underestimate what children are capable of.
jccalhoun 9y ago
I don't think what parents find scary is text but that programming is (for these parents) not text they comprehend. Now, there is an assumption with a book that kids will learn to read the language. Maybe parents should have the same attitude towards programming.

Clubber 9y ago

This is a really good idea, separating the logic from the syntax. I remember when I was learning database design and they taught us using Access, so we didn't get bogged down in the syntax. When I had to switch to Oracle professionally, I noticed I was constantly translating what I saw in Access to the PLSQL in Oracle. After a while, I just thought in PLSQL rather than Access. Something I've noticed all the years, teaching is HARD. Well, teaching effectively and efficiently is.

xigency 9y ago

I have a halfway decent solution to this problem. Currently, I'm working on a web-based game development language. Essentially, I would like to create a simple programming language, like BASIC, Lua, or others, and provide built-in libraries for 2D game making. Much of my formative programming experience was using using Blitz Basic, a game language. As a teenager, I was able to use it to create games easily. With all of the visual and graphical game development kits available today, I feel that it has become more difficult to learn programming in the way that I did. Providing a programming-based offering is the only solution, I think. When constructing functions and loops to coordinate and move or draw sprites, I think it becomes much easier to think about the logic of a computer program and how that knowledge can be practical.

RepressedEmu 9y ago
I think this is an amazing idea! I played with Basic and Visual Basic when I was younger and it taught me all about logic loops, basic data structures, etc. Putting that type of playground on the web sounds interesting. Have you started yet?
- xigency 9y ago
  I'm working on porting the language VM to asynchronous JavaScript. The language that I'm using is one that I've shared with HN before, although I've made major changes and added some nice features. Here is the Duck source code: https://github.com/gregtour/duck-lang/tree/duck2 https://github.com/gregtour/duck-lang/tree/duck2 The documentation reflects the original version, but duck2.cfg shows the new grammar and the /js folder shows the current progress. I have a mockup of the interface here as well: http://brainplex.net/gamepad/ http://brainplex.net/gamepad/ One big issue is finding time.

mjw1007 9y ago

Context: they're working on something aimed at children no older than 8.

0xbear 9y ago
Why do children under 8 need to know how to code? They don't even have simple things like cause and effect established in their brain until they're about 11. I.e. "if it's raining outside I should wear a rain coat or I'll get wet". Nor do they have much logical reasoning capability. That's also why they don't get sarcasm. Edit: paper on pre-adolescent and adolescent brain development, especially as it relates to cause and effect and abstract reasoning: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929314000516 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929314...
- jkaunisv1 9y ago
  You have a really weird idea of what an 11 year old is capable of.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Prefrontal cortex is still developing in 11 year olds which means they're not great at understanding consequences of actions or making complex future plans.
    - vidarh 9y ago
      But most of them are certainly capable of making the evaluation used as an example above.
      - xigency 9y ago
        Not to be the "prodigy" kid, but I began game programming at 10 years old because I wanted to know how games worked. I tried to buy a Visual Basic 5 book from Borders before my parents gave me "Beginning Programming for Dummies" instead. Not sure why these people don't believe that Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts can't tell the weather.

Xoros 9y ago

I don't know for US, but here, in France, children start to really learn to read at school after preschool, around 6-7 yo. Some succeed, some have difficulties to achieve. Of course they start learning concepts in preschool, but it's not an obligation to put your kids in preschool (most parents do, but you don't have to) So isn't it a problem with text, reading, words... than a specific code problem ? As a parent, I'm going to teach coding to my kids, starting next year, they'll be 8 yo. I'll start with scratch then probably some python. And I'm lucky my kids are both fluent readers. But I'll still start with scratch.

hacker_9 9y ago
The problem isn't reading ability, it's the rigid structure of words that confuses them (this happens at any age range). What is or isn't allowed? Grammar rules are invisible at the end of the day and to be honest what does 'move(.left)' signify? Even after 15 years as a programmer I find this grammar confusing, is it shorthand for 'this.left'? shorthand for an enum? I'm even wondering if this grammar is even useful, if it doesn't look anything like languages in commercial use. Using icons makes a lot more sense, as they are immediately recognizable pictures that come with the expectation of no structure to learn, and it looks like from the article they just simply put one icon after another in a list.

hzhou321 9y ago

Text is scary. They had the same barrier transition from picture books to books without pictures. It takes kindergarten where the set up of school give them the perception that they had no choice but to embrace the initial difficulty opened the door of wonder for them. I don't see much difference teaching them programming with a real programming language. They have to be forced to embrace it first.

kbsletten 9y ago
Well, to be fair programming is (currently, at least) an optional skill competing with soccer, guitar, and video games for mind space. Reading is the lowest bar for practically everything in modern life so there's more tolerance for sub-optimal teaching since we all are willing to hold feet to fire. Until coding is as ubiquitous as reading, we're going to have to do better.

Adamantcheese 9y ago

I wonder if it isn't the text that's putting parents off, but the specific lesser used symbols like parentheses and the such. For that same reason I believe parents think that math is hard in comparison to writing, due to the large amount of domain specific iconography. I also wonder what effect leetspeak might have on bridging that gap, even though it's probably not the best solution.

csallen 9y ago
I wondered the exact same thing. Having parentheses, periods, etc in seemingly-arbitrary positions looks complicated, at least in part because they are not self-explanatory. They tried "move(.up)", but did they try "move up"?
mysterydip 9y ago
That's a good point, and one reason I enjoyed BASIC and its dialects so much. Which is easier to explain to a new programmer: For i = 1 to 10 Or For (i = 1; i <= 10; i++) Once you understand how things work, translating that knowledge to another language and adding on concepts is relatively easy.
- vidarh 9y ago
  I still to this day, after about 30 years of exposure to C, 22 years of professional development, and many years of using C professionally, avoid the for() look in C because I struggle to remember which position the comparison vs. increment goes. I prefer to use while() loops. But I still remember the BASIC syntax you demonstrate above, 30+ years after I last programmed BASIC.
  - DiThi 9y ago
    > because I struggle to remember which position the comparison vs. increment goes Tip: they're in the same order they're used: comparison is always run at the beginning of each iteration, and increment is always done at the end. for(init; cond; last) ... init; while(cond) { ... ; last;} But I also dislike it and love "for ... in" constructs.

avaer 9y ago

I actually don't know any great coders that learned to code through these kinds of games. They might move the programming-is-interesting gradient, but I don't think the hard part about learning to code is the text. The hard part about coding is the problems that aren't in the code. Doing research, setting up environments, understanding platforms, dealing with crashes, dealing with crappy tools, debugging, understanding other people's code. None of this is taught by isolated sandbox games like this. Sandbox games might teach some very useful analytical skills, but it's pretty far from coding. The only thing you really need to get kids coding is to give them the tools needed to do interesting naughty things. Many of the programmers I know learned to code at an early age by hacking games to cheat against their friends. Reading text was never, ever a problem, but the disillusionment of finding out that coding doesn't involve pretty foolproof user interfaces might have been.

celim307 9y ago
Yes, this. Number one thing that will flatline my love for learning a new language is setting up the environment. When I'm 10 pages deep into stackoverflow search results trying to fix an obtuse package's error code, I'm close to giving up.
- vidarh 9y ago
  I'd say in general, the biggest problem with most tools is that installation on average tends to require too much effort. People experienced with the tools don't tend to work on fixing that because it's a solved problem for them. But the number of tools I've rejected because I was not yet convinced it'd be useful and so was unwilling to invest the time in getting them working is huge.
- default-kramer 9y ago
  Every time I do this, I wonder how any beginner ever gets their environment set up. Because as soon as something goes wrong (which happens more often than not), I'm drawing on years of experience that the beginner won't have. My first was C++ on Windows 95 and luckily we had internet at the time - it still took me multiple days before I got Hello World working. I think browser-based language introductions are great. They remove a huge obstacle and get you into the language right away.

bitL 9y ago

I think it's due to only 10% of humans primarily thinking in text/sound, whereas 40% are visual and 50% are emotional. This was exploited in e.g. Harry Potter books. I think we are due visually or voice-driven development environments that should be now possible with Deep Learning, even if initially a bit cranky.

jaequery 9y ago

if i had learned to code using those graphical things when i was growing up, i probably woupd not have become a coder. wheres the joy and fun in it? looks laborius and boring to me.

hartator 9y ago

I was playing this kind of games when I was a kid. More like a puzzle than coding though. Kids who want to learn how to code should just do it with regular tooling. You don't need any special approach.

andybak 9y ago

> From our perspective, we’d simplified the code to what looks like plain English. How do they square that with the presence of parentheses and the use of a syntactically significant period? It seems strange they didn’t start with something that looked more like Logo before concluding the text was inherently off-putting. I’m not sure their conclusion was wrong — but I’m confused about the point where they gave up with text. Also - the final syntax at the end is ugly as hell. Is that the best they can do? Finally - not even a hat-tip to Scratch/Blockly? If they aren't aware of it then it's very odd. If they are and decided not to mention it - I find that equally odd.

honoredb 9y ago

Cool! I feel like you could go further and let the student control the transfer to text. Give all the built-in functions both icons and names, and let student-defined functions be icons they create if they want. The point where it's less cognitive load to use text is going to be different for different students, so let text-based coding be a tool they discover, not a requirement imposed on them.

jrimbault 9y ago

I routinely send large text files to people around me, I noticed many people just refuse to read pure text. So I convert the text to pdf and add some flavor, pictures etc. Then people read it. edit: by "large" I mean, by my standards, ridiculously small, like 300 to 3000 words top, but people are scared by simple text.

0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
It could be a layout thing too. White space magically helps sometimes.

5trokerac3 9y ago

> Problem is, many newcomers, kids and adults alike, believe that code is inherently complex simply because it looks complex. But it is complex. Anything beyond the most basic examples delve into the concepts of calculus. If we don't expect most children to comprehend advanced mathematics until they're teenagers, why would we expect most of them to grasp anything but the most basic conditional logic until then. That's not to say that we shouldn't attempt to teach children coding at a young age, but the idea that anyone but a few would understand genuine coding at the same developmental period where they're learning to spell "dog" and to add 2+2 is a bit ridiculous. I wonder if the authors consulted a child psychologist before beginning their endeavor.

savanaly 9y ago
>But it is complex. Anything beyond the most basic examples delve into the concepts of calculus. Huh? My codebases at work have never involved calculus. Not all programming proceeds along the lines of Project Euler when getting more complex.
- 5trokerac3 9y ago
  The very concept of functions is calculus. Kids are in their teens before we even have them solving x=y algebra.
  - savanaly 9y ago
    Maybe we're working from different definitions of "calculus". To me, equations and relations between variables are not calculus, just algebra. Only when you start studying the infinitesimals of change does it start to count as calculus. I don't have any derivatives or integrals in my programs, and very few do.
    - carapace 9y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_calculus maybe?

NikolaeVarius 9y ago

Why is is this a problem? - Numbers are keeping kids from learning math. - Text is keeping kids from reading. - Too many words are keeping kids from listening to lectures. I don't understand why people find it difficult to just teach a kid how to do something rather than wait for some miracle solution.

0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
I offer my miracle solution: text is a bunch of tiny pictures.
- kps 9y ago
  Text started as tiny pictures. Trouble is, there's an unbounded amount of things you need pictures for. The great thing about phonetically-based writing is that a tractably small number of symbols can combine in a natural way to express anything.
fulafel 9y ago
That numbers idea has been held by a lot of smart people. For a while some countries taught set theory before numbers.

rb808 9y ago

I dont understand why elementary school kids need to code at all. Most of the developers my age didn't even see a computer until high school or college and they're great developers. A great preparation they should learn some math or ideally be having fun with their friends, running around outside or perhaps art or something creative.

iamatworknow 9y ago
I feel like this needs to be higher up. While of course any parent would want their child to meet and exceed any academic standards you or the school system set, childhood is the only time in your life where you're relatively free to make mistakes with friends and relationships, and that's how you learn to be a better person. It's a lot more difficult to learn that later in life than programming, in my opinion as someone who didn't start coding until he was in his early 20's but still struggles with relationships because of a unrelated, intense academic focus as a child.
trendroid 9y ago
>A great preparation they should learn some math or ideally be having fun with their friends, running around outside or perhaps art or something creative. Not sure why there is a dichotomy between this and playing a game on phone for 30 minutes to learn coding.

ankitrohatgi 9y ago

I had an excellent math education growing up (not in US) so programming did not seem intimidating to any of us as it looked a lot like math. For me the main motivation to code was to have my computer do the math and physics I was learning in school. US parents and teachers really need to push for better math skills rather than run away from it.

NumberSix 9y ago

IMHO the more likely explanation for these results is that the human visual system has built in mathematical, logical capabilities actually far beyond advanced college math. These are used to identify and track objects at a very early age. It is much easier to access these abilities using pictures and icons. Text is an additional layer of abstraction probably involving language and communication systems outside the human visual system. The text is a label or abstraction for the visually represented concepts which must be encountered and learned first. There is a consistent pattern in learning mathematics and other technical areas that most students learn better and faster with pictures and concrete examples. Abstraction comes later.

thanatropism 9y ago

I thought this would be "kids are texting rather than messing with their computers".

Froyoh 9y ago

I wonder what it's like growing up in today's world learning to code... Very different from how I was introduced to coding.

wiremine 9y ago

I'm the dad of an 11 year old boy and a 8 year old girl. Text IS scary, because it's nontrivial. There's a reason schools start with the ABCs and spend the first four years of school teaching kids to read. And even then we don't stop there: middle school focuses on grammar, and high school focuses on creating long-form content. Programming is similar: it's non trivial to stand up a knowledge base to be a programmer. I think the big difference is that most programming classes start in high school or college, well after we've mastered text in general. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. The key is to start small: don't expect novel-sized programs, expect words and sentences, and make those words and sentences FUN. For example, my son has had a TON of fun with the micro:bit [1], and it's scratch based system, and Swift playgrounds. [1] [1] http://microbit.org/ http://microbit.org/ [2] https://developer.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ https://developer.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

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Zigurd 9y ago

If software had started in China, we would not have these problems. There would be an ideogram for each operator or keyword. For one thing, the equals sign wouldn't be misused as an assignment operator.

dTal 9y ago

Lack of human factors knowledge in people who write software tools is keeping kids from coding. And adults, for that matter. There's a huge amount of incidental complexity and fragility that we just tolerate. I mean, how does move(.up) look like plain English? What's wrong with "move up"? Are we really so blind as to not realise that any normal person looking at that is going to get the strong impression they don't know what the hell is going on? Hell, I don't know what's going on. What's with the period? What happens if I don't type it? Fragile and incidentally complex. Now to be fair there are intrinsic differences between typing in a blank text box and dragging and dropping icons. You can type anything in a text box, while icons present a limited selection. This hurts discoverability, which is why the author saw better results when they gradually swapped out the icons for text. Dragging and dropping is an atomic transaction which can be cancelled with good feedback if the user attempts something invalid; this is not quite so easy with typing, because valid code must be reached through invalid states on a letter-by-letter basis. But proper coding in a Turing-complete sense (which none of the games seem to offer) involves defining your own symbols and wrestling with abstract notions like iteration that lend themselves increasingly badly to representation in sprite form. Scratch is a good example of a system that attempts to use the best of both worlds - its building blocks are text-based, but selectable from a limited number, atomically placed, and statically checked to practically preclude syntax errors. Text itself isn't intrinsically bad. Lastly - it's a shame the industry moved on from BASIC. Programming was never more accessible than when the average personal computer booted to a REPL of a standardized, easy-to-use language.

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MisterBastahrd 9y ago

Are you a coder if you don't understand what syntax is? We used LOGO when I was a kid, and for good reason. It had a limited syntax for classroom use and gave you instant visual gratification. Sometimes I wonder if being limited to text adventures when I was really young was a benefit. If I typed something that the computer didn't understand, it told me so. It forced me to have patience and to learn to look up the right way to ask for something.

pjmlp 9y ago

Text didn't prevent me to learn Timex 2068 Basic and Z80 Assembly at the age of 10. What I would concede is that we had fun books to learn from, like these ones for the Atari http://www.atariarchives.org/ http://www.atariarchives.org/.

otterpro 9y ago

I definitely agree that text is very intimidating, no matter how well it is represented, compounded by inclusion of numbers and punctuation like (, ), ;,. +,-,<,>, etc. Another is that we no longer have the text-based interface in things that we use. In the classic computing era, text games like "Zork" were popular, and even DOS and *nix text shells were the norm. Even adventure games like Sierra Online games had graphic view but had text interface. Perhaps text-based user interface could lessen the anxiety of text in coding, but I think that we no longer value text UI. Instead, everything is GUI now, with touch-interface on iOS/Android in the mix - and perhaps someday, we no longer will have mouse/keyboard, but rather just verbal and physical interface. By then, we can program things using complex language such as "I'd like to move the yellow box sprite on top of the tree to the left about 50 pixels", then programming code becomes more approachable to average human. We are already on our way, with Alexa and Siri.

wikwocket 9y ago

There was some great prior discussion of the topic of kids, text, and coding in a thread about Scratch 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274249

steego 9y ago

Good article. I hope this article inspires more people to come up with clever solutions that help bridge the gap with kids and coding. It's easy for most of us to discount the barriers of syntax because it's so familiar to us, but try to remember this: People consistently fail PEDMAS tests online. That's a trivial syntax. I like their approach to transitioning from an icon/diagram approach to a text approach. It highlights that text and iconic/diagram representations don't have to be a false dichotomy. These two ideas can complement each other if done carefully. If there's one thing I'd love for every person who aspires to create a visual development environment is this: Visual representations should be used to enhance and project program structure, not to replace text altogether. Much in the same way that the CoffeeScript --> JavaScript translation page illuminates the language, I believe we should be projecting our text languages into various clear visual representations. Having been made to suffer through a few Enterprise Integration Tools (BizTalk, MuleSoft) that take a diagram first approach, I concluded they would be much better served if they took a text-first DSL approach that is isomorphic with a diagram representation. By binding the two at the hip, working with the diagram based UI would visually teach the user's understanding of the DSL syntax. In the other direction, playing with the text interface could instantly reveal how the parser is interpreting the intent of the program. Again, I'd love to see more people take perspectives past the usual false dichotomies and start researching how different approaches can complement each other rather than compete for attention and mindshare.

21 9y ago

Are 5 year olds expected to read these days? I learned it at 7-8.

hathawsh 9y ago
I remember getting frustrated with my kindergarten teacher because she insisted that the letters "T-H-E" spelled a familiar word, yet the word has no T sound, H sound, or E sound. What a garbage language, I thought. So yeah, I'd say kids start to learn to read at 5 or earlier.

crikli 9y ago

I started my professional life as a stockbroker and I remember my mentor saying "Money Magazine does not exist to advise individuals to make great trading decisions, it exists to sell copies of Money Magazine." I've since applied this logic fairly universally and I'm going to apply it here: SpriteBox does not exist to teach kids to be great coders, it exists to sell copies of SpriteBox. The challenge of text undoubtedly is a blocker to the sales of SpriteBox. I do not believe that it is a blocker to a kid becoming a great coder. Coding absolutely requires a high level of comfort with abstraction. It requires the ability to mentally model abstractions, maintain relationships between abstractions, and make a (sorta) concrete reality of those abstractions. Coders must be able to make intuitive mental leaps based on disparate and distributed data. Often the solutions that coders come up with are based on little bits and pieces of the puzzle based on SO answers, documentation, blog posts, example code found on github, etc. The solutions to tough problems are rarely found in a single neat all-explaining resource. So... if a kid is having trouble with text I would candidly posit that the kid may not have the ability to deal with abstraction that coding requires. Not a problem for the industry as there are already enough coders who have this issue, but it creates a sales problem for SpriteBox. EDIT: typo, clarity

hasenj 9y ago
This. But also the problem with the OP is they seem to show people samples of a programming language without any explanation, expecting them to intuitively figure out the syntax and semantics. There's no way this won't be confusing.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
As someone who's grown up with computers, I think the biggest difference I see between ”technical” and “non-technical” people is a willingness to try things out and not be put off by intimidating new things. If you are willing to explore you will eventually figure it out, but if you are afraid you'll never get anywhere.
dyarosla 9y ago
OP here. You're right that SpriteBox does not exist to teach kids to be great coders. It exists to get as many kids as possible engaged with what programming is and excited to learn more. Especially kids who may not be 'naturally inclined' to code. What makes your argument fall flat is, we already had LightBot: it teaches kids to program with icons only. If text was a blocker for SpriteBox, why would we pursue it at all? You end by saying that kids who fear text are not well suited for coding. That's like saying kids who fear symbols are not well suited to math. This kind of sentiment is what drives people to believe that they should give up things that they may excel at given enough time and interest. SpriteBox, like many coding apps, is about sparking that interest. As for text, the real reason we tackle that is because there's a real gap for people between icons and textual programming: some people have this disconnect between what they perceive coding is. Is visual coding "real"? Are formulas in excel "coding"? These are answers programmers can answer, but not people unfamiliar with code.

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jlebrech 9y ago

I learnt to code with logo, and that was text based. why are we trying to force kids to learn how computers till they are interested in it. They should be learning to ride bikes or climb trees. what we lack in the computing world are games they can make by following a book, eventually they'll want to diverge from what's in the book and make their own stuff, the problem is no games are too complex and a simple game might not hold their attention. Something like Mario Maker is where they probably should start but the extra options to change variables and access scripts later on.

sevensor 9y ago

There's a discussion of this on the Bootstrap blog: http://www.bootstrapworld.org/blog/blocks/Block-Getting-Started.shtml http://www.bootstrapworld.org/blog/blocks/Block-Getting-Star.... (That's Bootstrap, the teach-scheme-to-middle-school-children project, not Bootstrap the JS library.) They've tried it both ways. I'll quote their bullet points: > Things we love about blocks > 1. Blocks lower the barrier for entry > 2. Less frustration > 3. Useful hints > 4. Visual reinforcement of structure > Things we don't love about blocks > 1. Penalizes fast typers > 2. Higher demand on short-term memory > 3. Small space of visual cues > 4. Poor Accessibility They go into detail on each of these.

Jtsummers 9y ago

Your text notation was: move(.up) What does the `.` do? Why can't it just be: move(up) What purpose do the parentheses have? Are they essential or optional? Why not: move up Ok, you wanted it to be like a "real" language, I guess? Look at Logo and Basic. They largely eschewed punctuation (not entirely) for text and newlines and meaningful names: pen down forward 100 right 90 forward 50 pen up

superplussed 9y ago
I thought the same thing when I saw this.
hasenj 9y ago
Arbitrary syntax rules. Why would they be surprised that people find it confusing?
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masklinn 9y ago
> What does the `.` do? Why can't it just be: > move(up) One of the latter pictures shows "swift syntax", so I expect that's that: .up is a shortcut for a variant in a sum type, as it is in Swift.
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  Not knowing Swift, I would've guessed something similar. But that hardly makes it a suitable language to dump on kids. For an educational language, you need to start off small with intuitively sensible constructs, and build up. You can move towards that syntax, but you can hardly start there. EDIT: Actually, I'm going to make a stronger statement. You shouldn't make an educational video game, and particularly an educational programming game, until you've read Mindstorms and learned what Papert and others studied last century.
dyarosla 9y ago
OP here. So yes, we could have gone the "move up" route. In fact, we did at one point! Even then though, icons were far and away less intimidating. The problem is, real programming languages don't eschew punctuation, Logo included (once you include loops and such). AND our primary goal was to get kids familiar with reading real looking code (in this case, Swift). The last option would be to start with "move up"s, and then introduce punctuation later... but then players would get confused as to why punctuation, unneeded before, suddenly becomes required? Finding the middle ground of jumping from icons to textual code (with punctuation) resolved all of these issues best. And yes, we've read Mindstorms ;)

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otakucode 9y ago

I learned to code when I was 9 years old. It was in text. No one helped me. I found a couple books with my parents computer, 'Introduction to BASIC' and understood that if I learned what was in the book, I could make the computer do what I wanted. I don't know programming was supposed to be hard. I didn't know some adults did it as a job. I just knew that if I learned what was in the books, I could do stuff. So I started reading, and I never ran into anything that was beyond my grasp. I do recall reading one part that said a person who did not draw a flowchart before writing a program was either a genius or a fool and resolved to be a genius (hey I was 9). Not even refusing to create flowcharts prevented me. I feel in love the day I wrote: 10 PRINT "I LOVE YOU MOM" 20 GOTO 10 And filled the screen then called my mom into the room to look at it. Text is not keeping kids from coding. Adults are. Adults making kids think it's difficult, adults standing in the way and shuttering them into unnecessarily dumbed down environments, standing over their shoulder and making sure they don't do anything inappropriate, etc. But more than anything, adults filling kids free time and never giving them the opportunity to just sit down, have a quiet few hours, and figure things out.

szatkus 9y ago
"we got responses that estimated ages 9, 10 and up- " The point is text looks too complex for younger kids. 5 year old won't sit down for a few hours and figure out things. He will just get bored.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  Other than sales of this app, why is it necessary for 5 year olds to be programming?
  - szatkus 9y ago
    Maybe because their parents want them to. It's like dads teaching their kids how to use tools and fix things. Something they find enjoyable and useful, want to learn their children to have something in common. But probably they just read somewhere that programming is the future.
  - 9y ago

githubber123 9y ago

And yet I hate game engine visual programming, whatever you call connecting those boxes together. I started out thinking the windows commands were doing something cool and then wanted to make games so i asked my parents for the Dark Basic software set and began moving images around that shoot sprites I drew. From there I asked for a Borland C book that came with a compiler and then jumped into web design a bit. That was about 20 years ago for me and now I'm a system admin and reverse engineering/making whatever I can on the side.

brandonmenc 9y ago

Didn't Alan Kay and team get a bunch of elementary school-aged children - who had probably never even seen a computer before, since this was in the 70s - programming in Smalltalk?

scroot 9y ago
Yes. Not only that, but by observing the kids they iterated on different versions of Smalltalk. The approach there was quite different from what you see today. They built upon actual psychology and spent the money and time conducting studies. From that we got things like GUI, OO, etc. When you see Kay harping on about the dismal state of affairs today, I think it's that he sees this constant pedantic bickering about static vs dynamic typing and all the rest as meddling around in the complexity of things that should be irrelevant. To the point of the original post, it's also worth noting that Smalltalks were not just text environments, and that while yes much of the code was written in text, these kids were not writing text files that they then compiled/interpreted using their PDP Terminal emulation programs. They were doing everything in the live environment itself. Considering the existence of things like Smalltalk and Hypercard, whenever some uber programming expert tells you this-or-that reason we cannot have such systems in wide use today, it's akin to saying: "See all this great stuff we used to have? We can't have it anymore"
scroot 9y ago
Here is one of the relevant portions of Kay's documentary, which was recorded years later: https://youtu.be/p2LZLYcu_JY?t=35m21s https://youtu.be/p2LZLYcu_JY?t=35m21s

cordite 9y ago

I was at a conference lately. After one talk, the presenter talked about his experiences with his children presenting how to code and teach other children. He commented that one of the biggest barriers he saw in his own children is that it took them so long to type out the ideas they have in their head. It requires immense focus to retain what to do next.

MarcScott 9y ago

I took a break from teaching for a year, to be a 3D graphic artist, using Cinema 4D. The software had a drag and drop, node based, coding environment called Xpresso, that I became quite adept at using. I can remember showing it to my programmer brother, and he told me if I liked using Xpresso I should try a proper language. I dismissed him, saying that typing text held no appeal for me. A couple of years later, and I was back teaching ICT and the curriculum was being axed, in favour of Computer Science, so I decided to teach myself a little Python, and ended up being a secondary CS teacher in a fairly elite school. What strikes me now, is at no point did I make a connection between the graphical language I was using back then and the text based languages I would go on to use later. In hindsight it seems obvious that if I enjoyed controlling pixels on a screen with blocks, I would probably enjoy doing it with text. It's anecdotal, but it has turned out to be true. In my professional capacity as an educator, I have seen how engaged young students can be with graphical languages such as Scratch, and how those same students eventually want the power and control of more powerful languages. These types of games don't teach everyone how to code, but they do awaken a desire to control and manipulate computers, in people who might otherwise never have realised this ambition. For people who say that the hard part of programming is "not in the text", watch a seven year old try to control a turtle in Scratch and then watch them try to do the same thing in Python. Typing speed is a major factor, as is understanding the importance of case and white space. Not to mention the symbol nightmare of commas, full stops, colons, semi-colons, single and double quotes, hyphens, underscores, equals and double-equals, square braces, curly braces, angle braces, and parenthesis.

gasbag 9y ago
You might be interested in the Luna programming language/dev environment. It's designed to have a 1:1 correspondence between the visual, node-based environment and the written forms of the code. I haven't been able to try it yet since it's still in closed alpha, but it looks very intriguing! Given your experience with a similar visual language and later interest in more conventional programming, you could make a good case for getting into the alpha. There's a signup form on their site (one for the alpha and one for their newsletter, depending on your level of interest). http://www.luna-lang.org/ http://www.luna-lang.org/ Last HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14612680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14612680

Bjorkbat 9y ago

The title makes me cringe a little. It implies the text-based nature of most programming languages is a problem, even THE problem. It is, if you're trying to simply get young kids to use <insert language here>, vs get them to use said languages to interesting problems. The problem as I see it is that parents across the country are trying to prepare their children for a job landscape which may change radically between now and when they graduate high school by getting them while they're young and attempting to introduce them to coding as early as 3. Not programming, not learning how to solve problems with an algorithmic mindset. Coding. As in getting them comfortable with slinging around functions that build a website using magic. Really, we should be teaching them to do the thing that we're trying to do with programming languages in the first place, which is solve problems with an algorithmic mindset. I think SpriteBox gets it, kinda, where it falls short is that in the end they're still hung up by the whole "let's teach kids how to code" trap and gradually replace the icons with text and do this weird thing where icons are indented because text-based code is indented. In the end kids know how these languages work, and how to do simple things with them, but they've learned all of this within the context of what looks like a platforming game. Extending this to the act of creating something is different. If you really want to teach kids how to program, create an environment that teaches them how to build and create something cool using a few simple and easy to understand rules. Allow them to experiment with the rules to see what happens. Make it so that the upper threshold for how you can bend the rules, combine rules, etc, is to all concerned essentially non-existent. Enable and reward creativity, which is something a lot of "coding" games and toys and whatever simply don't do. They enable and reward you to help a cute robot walk in a damn line.

yorwba 9y ago
My gateway drugs into programming were AutoIt (https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/ https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/) and Ren'Py (https://renpy.org/ https://renpy.org/). AutoIt lets you control the mouse, simulate keyboard input and so on. It was pretty fun as a kid to make a "can't press this button" game and watch others try to beat it. There wer also bindings to various Windows APIs, which I used to build GUI solvers for my math homework. Ren'Py is a framework for creating visual novels, and I made one that mocked the vocabulary tests by having each choice be a pun on bastardized French or a running gag in my French class. I think pretty much everyone in that class played it at some point. My point being, there are tools out there with a special-purpose scripting language used by content creators who might themselves not be expert programmers, and I if you let kids play around with that they will probably build something they find fun without anyone telling them to do so.

payne92 9y ago

> We showed the above to playtesters (kids and parents) who told > us what we didn’t want to hear: the game looks complicated. That's because real programming is complicated. Software systems, with billions or even trillions of switch points, are the most complex things humans have ever built, by far. We have tried mightily, for many, many decades, to make programming simpler and more accessible. The problem: instructing a computer precisely and unambiguously what to do means you have to precisely and unambiguously specify...what to do! There's no getting around it, just like there's no way (yet) to write a novel without choosing words and pushing letter keys. The graphic approaches quickly get tedious beyond toy examples. Graphs are fine for telling your Lego robot what to do, but with the Web and app store overflowing with cool apps, the bar for grabbing and keeping a would-be programmer's attention is now quite high. My bet: non-programmers will "program" at scale when where's a fundamentally new computing model. Machine learning & deep learning are the most promising for this, I think: instead of telling the machine precisely what to do (and how), you show examples of the behavior you want and give feedback when it's wrong.

cr0sh 9y ago
> The graphic approaches quickly get tedious beyond toy examples. The things I have seen created in LabVIEW would absolutely astound you - not just in their complexity, but in the fact that they work at all (for various values of "work"), and that someone somewhere out there is able to maintain them without going insane. /then again, maybe there are more insane LabVIEW developers than I know...

lostcolony 9y ago

Umm...where's the research on the efficacy of the change on how skilled the kid becomes at programming? All I see is they self-assessed that it was easier with pictures, and they were engaged longer. Great. But DID THEY LEARN TO CODE BETTER? The algebra comparison is telling; "a study was done that showed that 92.9% of kids using the app achieved mastery of basic algebra after 1.5 hours of play" - where's the similar comparison? And, how do we measure 'mastery'? Because the mathematical lexicon requires numbers, not pictures, and coding non-trivial things are done with languages that are text, not pictures, the way we test that is also important. Note that fundamentally I agree with their conclusion that, pursuant to being marketable, they HAVE to use pictures, because people's impressions matter. But in terms of actual benefit, I'd want to know more details.

wikwocket 9y ago
They did not do hard research, since they are still designing their game, but they did present it to playtesters. I think this is an appropriate level of diligence for a product early in the design phase, it's the equivalent of the "hallway usability testing" recommended for agile teams. It may be impossible to say right now whether this change helps kids get better at programming faster, but presumably, more kids will play a game that they feel is more approachable, similar to how the playtesters responded.
- lostcolony 9y ago
  Like I said, I don't fault their methods for what they're optimizing for: sales. I -do- fault them for implying that it will improve coding skills when they never tested for that.

kazinator 9y ago

The kids they are working with are in an age group in which some children are just beginning to read. Yes, text is a problem if you're not yet literate.

a-nikolaev 9y ago

By starting with icons first, you intuitively teach the idea of tokenization of the program code. This idea is important, but trivially simple to an experienced programmer so easily dismissed. It is not that obvious to a beginner tho.

sebow 9y ago

Really? Are we gonna complain that 5 years old kids won't learn "coding" because of text? Let them be kids, at least till like 10 or something when they actually get interested in technology, kids at this age should "master" human interaction, not be deprived about it.That's why they complain about text and love images/audio/etc, because they "started" using their senses and they like having them stimulated. I'm kind of "hypocritical" here since i kind of did those aswell when i was very young,but it was from personal interest,I wasn't forced/guided to it(more like the contrary really),it sparked in my own mind. Pushing people in STEM/or tech to be more specific, specially from ages like these ones is very questionable at best, and the best argument against it is the health factor in, let them develop their bodies firstly before they start getting interested with their brains.(if at all)

cr0sh 9y ago

I can't comment too much on this, except to say that it did cause me to recall something from my early childhood. I remembered that in the first grade of elementary school, when I was 6 years old, that we used these workbooks with tear out pages to do these "math" problems. Simple addition and subtraction, IIRC. But these workbooks didn't use numbers and symbols; instead quantities were shown by fixed objects (like coins, or other images), symbols were replaced by something else, but I don't recall exactly what (maybe simple words - so not completely "text free"). On a different note - a few years ago my wife asked me to look over a friend's child's homework, to try to figure out how to do the problems, and what the answers were, because her child was having problems doing the homework, and neither she nor my wife could figure it out (neither are very math fluent). I looked at it - and at first it was "gibberish". There were some "standard" symbols for multiplication and addition, subtraction and the like. But everything else was symbols. Like, there'd be a problem that visually was something like "circle + ? = triangle" or "2 square + 3 triangle = ?" (I may be mis-remembering things, too). It was very confusing, but fortunately the worksheet (which was all I had) had a couple of "example problems" and their solutions included. I studied things for a bit, then it dawned on me: It was algebra - but it was being taught with symbols instead of numbers, and the solution (and how to arrive at it) was pretty simple to understand, once this was realized. In short, numbers are symbols (hey, I'm not a big math whiz myself - I know just enough to blow my foot off) - so it made sense that swapping these out wasn't that big of a deal, provided you had some base knowledge about the rules (which were provided by the examples). I was able to figure the problems out, then write down how things worked for her (and her child) to read and understand. AFAIK, the homework was completed and turned in with correct answers. At the time, her child was probably in the 4th or 5th grade, and it was interesting to me that the school was using such a system to teach algebra at an earlier age than what I recall having learned it (my first real algebra class wasn't until 7th grade, though in elementary school in 5th and 6th grades we had been doing some of the basics beforehand - I guess for "prep" for the coming years). So, in the case of coding, I can see how this idea of starting with "abstract icons" (somewhat) to represent certain coding statements and ideas - and gradually phasing in text - seems like something that should work (and they seem to prove that it does, too). Oh - another early example from when I was younger; arguably I first started to "program" when I got my first programmable toy - a Milton Bradley Big Trak. It's keypad used mostly symbols (plus some numbers) - but had other symbols for other actions...hmm.

cutler 9y ago

Kids learn to read music at school so why should learning to code be any easier? Skills have to be learned. Simple as that.