9 ms·

What's great about this is that my daughter and I could use the living room tv to make a game- Even if the game is simple, it'll be a lot more compelling to a k

by drcode 9y ago

What's great about this is that my daughter and I could use the living room tv to make a game- Even if the game is simple, it'll be a lot more compelling to a kid if they can design it themselves and then play it on a giant tv- Looking forward to trying this!

rocky1138 9y ago
I think it's fantastic that it brings us right back to one of the things that made the first home computers so compelling: the ability to see what you just did on your TV.
- fsloth 9y ago
  Eh, what. You can connect any modern device to a tv through hdmi and hdmi convertor. Pc:s, phones, pads...
  - rocky1138 9y ago
    I think maybe I'm explaining it wrong. I'm sorry. What I mean to say is that there was a certain wonder and a strange form of legitimacy that writing software on a "real" computer that kids got when they were able to type something into the same device that ran their favourite games/software from "real" developers and see it show up on the screen just like the big boys. There was a sense of "Wow, anything is possible now that I can develop real software!" The legitimacy of the company that produced Mario, etc. will rub off onto a new generation of kids and make them feel like they are really playing with the big boys. I don't know how to explain this right. I know that I myself still get this feeling when I see something I wrote running on an actual Atari Jaguar because I was such a fan of that console when I was a kid. It's like, "wow, I'm actually a real developer! I made it!" I start thinking about all the things I can do and all of the possibilities that are more than just firing pixels on a screen. It's a form of technological empowerment, and it's something that makes a huge difference in a kid's life. I know it did for me when I first discovered BASIC on the Commodore.
    - Will_Parker 9y ago
      I would suggest that maybe this says something more about you and your natural passion, than whether your first intellectual doodles were on a TV or a monitor.
      - rocky1138 9y ago
        I didn't downvote you, but I am confused by what you mean. Can you elaborate?
    - libertine 9y ago
      You're completely right there's a positive emotional response to this - just like the click when you pressed the cartridge, the same reason Nintendo brought the click sound to the Switch controls - the sound means "it's fun time!". This is about telling stories with your kids - it's a canvas in your living room for everyone to see, give ideas and encourage - all packed in a box you have positive emotions towards. It's not "any device" that can connect to the TV - it's your Switch, and you can make games on it now! Fuze can make programming fun :)
      - fsloth 9y ago
        My kids would rather play minecraft than code. They can create stuff in it too. Instant gratification trumps intellectual development 9/10 times if given free choice. I know some people have the capability to motivate kids in anything but the only way I know of to redirect mine from games is pulling the plug. Yes, I've tried many ways to get them interested on how the stuff they enjoy actually works, but they prefer to use digital stuff just for entertainment.
        libertine 9y ago
        The problem is how it's being frame - playing minecraft is intellectual development in a way. But I get the instant gratification part - which this language, if was well built, should have small milestones do display progress.
    - 9y ago
  - seabird 9y ago
    Yes, you can hook up a laptop to a TV. Then you'll sit down your eight year old and explain all of the messy tooling and errata of :insertlanguagehere:, and after multiple hours of stumbling through an IDE with too many features for them to comprehend (or a CLI environment that simply frustrates them), they'll say "damn, this sucks." It was without a doubt significantly easier to start programming when the process consisted of hook the Commodore up to the TV, plop in your disks/tape, and write in a dead simple language that can be largely described in a few short pages. We haven't had anything like that for years; a spiritual successor to BASIC on a set hardware and software environment (the Switch) is as close as we'll probably come in this day and age.
    - komali2 9y ago
      Almost every old wizard-level programmer I've talked to started off by being massively inspired by the ability to program games when they were kids. A teaching technique as old as teaching - find something the kid is actively interested in and excited about, and sneakily teach them stuff using that.
      - noir_lord 9y ago
        Not wizard-level but I got started programming on a ZX-81 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Sinclair-ZX81.png/1200px-Sinclair-ZX81.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Si...) Which was a few years old then, the games such as they where never held any interest but a machine that could be told what to do was magic to me. I could write programs on a ZX Speccy before I could read (properly) and that started a life-long love (and career) in software development.
    - fsloth 9y ago
      I introduced my 8 year old to Scratch and he loved it. But generally games and videos they could be enjoying on a device are so distracting in my kids minds they are not really interested in the concept of further education in the subject. They'd rather play Minecraft. Which is totally fine, not anyone needs to be a programmer and I'm not going to jepardize any internal motivation to the subject in the future by being overtly persuasive about it.
  - komali2 9y ago
    I've noticed this kind of response before - recall that when Dropbox was first shown to HN, one of the responses was something along the lines of "This is trivial to set up with a linux box and (esoteric techno-babble follows)." Not wrong, per se, but a super-technical HN reader was not the target of Dropbox, and I feel like it's the same situation here. While you could, I guess, plug your HDMI cable from your computer running your first hello world python program onto a screen, I think there's something much more tangible and incredible to a child to run their own code on the device they usually play video games on. As a 10 year old, I would flux around with the debugger cheat in my Star Wars n64 game and think "well obviously these numbers change the color of fog, but how on earth did they code the actual game? The characters? The lasers?" What's being demonstrated here is "look kids, it IS possible for YOU to write code and run it on a video game console! YOU can become a game developer, if you learn about this stuff!" Another anecdote - my uncle gave me his old computer to pull to pieces, I wanted to know how it went from circuits to showing Windows on the screen. I finally get to what he kept calling the "motherboard" and "processor," which he said is where most of the work is happening. So I pulled off the processor, disappointed at just seeing more circuits. He said there was even more circuitry inside it, so I cracked it open to find a black blob of I guess silicon. Nothing revealing how it worked! "What'd you expect to find," he asked, "a brain?" Imagine if the gap had someone been bridged by the existence of arduinos back then, or even just redstone in minecraft - a direct link between logic gates and, say, a calculator working.
    - mathgeek 9y ago
      > Not wrong, per se, but a super-technical HN reader was not the target of Dropbox, and I feel like it's the same situation here. Even for highly technical users, "pay someone else to do something trivial for me, because they do it well" is still a huge draw.
    - xfer 9y ago
      > What's being demonstrated here is "look kids, it IS possible for YOU to write code and run it on a video game console! YOU can become a game developer, if you learn about this stuff!" You do realize that people play game on PC too? The main issue that you are trying to address, i think, is whether there are other frameworks in teaching kids programming with games? In, fact the part of world where i live in, it is much more expensive to buy a nintendo switch than to assemble a computer and hook it up to your tv and use scratch to teach the kids.

by drcode 9y ago

rocky1138 9y ago

I think it's fantastic that it brings us right back to one of the things that made the first home computers so compelling: the ability to see what you just did on your TV.

fsloth 9y ago
Eh, what. You can connect any modern device to a tv through hdmi and hdmi convertor. Pc:s, phones, pads...
- rocky1138 9y ago
  I think maybe I'm explaining it wrong. I'm sorry. What I mean to say is that there was a certain wonder and a strange form of legitimacy that writing software on a "real" computer that kids got when they were able to type something into the same device that ran their favourite games/software from "real" developers and see it show up on the screen just like the big boys. There was a sense of "Wow, anything is possible now that I can develop real software!" The legitimacy of the company that produced Mario, etc. will rub off onto a new generation of kids and make them feel like they are really playing with the big boys. I don't know how to explain this right. I know that I myself still get this feeling when I see something I wrote running on an actual Atari Jaguar because I was such a fan of that console when I was a kid. It's like, "wow, I'm actually a real developer! I made it!" I start thinking about all the things I can do and all of the possibilities that are more than just firing pixels on a screen. It's a form of technological empowerment, and it's something that makes a huge difference in a kid's life. I know it did for me when I first discovered BASIC on the Commodore.
  - Will_Parker 9y ago
    I would suggest that maybe this says something more about you and your natural passion, than whether your first intellectual doodles were on a TV or a monitor.
    - rocky1138 9y ago
      I didn't downvote you, but I am confused by what you mean. Can you elaborate?
  - libertine 9y ago
    You're completely right there's a positive emotional response to this - just like the click when you pressed the cartridge, the same reason Nintendo brought the click sound to the Switch controls - the sound means "it's fun time!". This is about telling stories with your kids - it's a canvas in your living room for everyone to see, give ideas and encourage - all packed in a box you have positive emotions towards. It's not "any device" that can connect to the TV - it's your Switch, and you can make games on it now! Fuze can make programming fun :)
    - fsloth 9y ago
      My kids would rather play minecraft than code. They can create stuff in it too. Instant gratification trumps intellectual development 9/10 times if given free choice. I know some people have the capability to motivate kids in anything but the only way I know of to redirect mine from games is pulling the plug. Yes, I've tried many ways to get them interested on how the stuff they enjoy actually works, but they prefer to use digital stuff just for entertainment.
      - libertine 9y ago
        The problem is how it's being frame - playing minecraft is intellectual development in a way. But I get the instant gratification part - which this language, if was well built, should have small milestones do display progress.
  - 9y ago
- seabird 9y ago
  Yes, you can hook up a laptop to a TV. Then you'll sit down your eight year old and explain all of the messy tooling and errata of :insertlanguagehere:, and after multiple hours of stumbling through an IDE with too many features for them to comprehend (or a CLI environment that simply frustrates them), they'll say "damn, this sucks." It was without a doubt significantly easier to start programming when the process consisted of hook the Commodore up to the TV, plop in your disks/tape, and write in a dead simple language that can be largely described in a few short pages. We haven't had anything like that for years; a spiritual successor to BASIC on a set hardware and software environment (the Switch) is as close as we'll probably come in this day and age.
  - komali2 9y ago
    Almost every old wizard-level programmer I've talked to started off by being massively inspired by the ability to program games when they were kids. A teaching technique as old as teaching - find something the kid is actively interested in and excited about, and sneakily teach them stuff using that.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      Not wizard-level but I got started programming on a ZX-81 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Sinclair-ZX81.png/1200px-Sinclair-ZX81.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Si...) Which was a few years old then, the games such as they where never held any interest but a machine that could be told what to do was magic to me. I could write programs on a ZX Speccy before I could read (properly) and that started a life-long love (and career) in software development.
  - fsloth 9y ago
    I introduced my 8 year old to Scratch and he loved it. But generally games and videos they could be enjoying on a device are so distracting in my kids minds they are not really interested in the concept of further education in the subject. They'd rather play Minecraft. Which is totally fine, not anyone needs to be a programmer and I'm not going to jepardize any internal motivation to the subject in the future by being overtly persuasive about it.
- komali2 9y ago
  I've noticed this kind of response before - recall that when Dropbox was first shown to HN, one of the responses was something along the lines of "This is trivial to set up with a linux box and (esoteric techno-babble follows)." Not wrong, per se, but a super-technical HN reader was not the target of Dropbox, and I feel like it's the same situation here. While you could, I guess, plug your HDMI cable from your computer running your first hello world python program onto a screen, I think there's something much more tangible and incredible to a child to run their own code on the device they usually play video games on. As a 10 year old, I would flux around with the debugger cheat in my Star Wars n64 game and think "well obviously these numbers change the color of fog, but how on earth did they code the actual game? The characters? The lasers?" What's being demonstrated here is "look kids, it IS possible for YOU to write code and run it on a video game console! YOU can become a game developer, if you learn about this stuff!" Another anecdote - my uncle gave me his old computer to pull to pieces, I wanted to know how it went from circuits to showing Windows on the screen. I finally get to what he kept calling the "motherboard" and "processor," which he said is where most of the work is happening. So I pulled off the processor, disappointed at just seeing more circuits. He said there was even more circuitry inside it, so I cracked it open to find a black blob of I guess silicon. Nothing revealing how it worked! "What'd you expect to find," he asked, "a brain?" Imagine if the gap had someone been bridged by the existence of arduinos back then, or even just redstone in minecraft - a direct link between logic gates and, say, a calculator working.
  - mathgeek 9y ago
    > Not wrong, per se, but a super-technical HN reader was not the target of Dropbox, and I feel like it's the same situation here. Even for highly technical users, "pay someone else to do something trivial for me, because they do it well" is still a huge draw.
  - xfer 9y ago
    > What's being demonstrated here is "look kids, it IS possible for YOU to write code and run it on a video game console! YOU can become a game developer, if you learn about this stuff!" You do realize that people play game on PC too? The main issue that you are trying to address, i think, is whether there are other frameworks in teaching kids programming with games? In, fact the part of world where i live in, it is much more expensive to buy a nintendo switch than to assemble a computer and hook it up to your tv and use scratch to teach the kids.