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Hi, congrats and thanks! What's been your rationale when deciding what are the most essential features? Do you envision Mu as being someone's learning-to-code

Hi, congrats and thanks! What's been your rationale when deciding what are the most essential features? Do you envision Mu as being someone's learning-to-code editor, then "graduating" to one of the big players or you think one can "grow into a programmer" and keep "living" in Mu? (edit: the 2nd question is answered here: https://codewith.mu/en/tutorials/1.0/moving-on https://codewith.mu/en/tutorials/1.0/moving-on)

ntoll 8y ago
Thank you! The rational for deciding features is three-fold: * A positive answer to, "is it going to make it easy for a beginner to write, execute and change code?" is the first requirement (we check this with user research -- I've observed lessons, code clubs and other beginner-related activities as well as interviewed teachers and learners to find out how they react). * Alternatively, we checked the features the Raspberry Pi Foundation had feedback about. For instance, the zoom in/out buttons were one of the most requested features from teachers in feedback to the RPi education team. When I demoed this to teachers for the first time there were gasps of amazement (which made me smile, given what a simple / easy to implement feature this is). This is extraordinarily useful in a classroom situation and for learners who may have a visual impairment (such as older learners with bad eyesight... a group I had never initially thought would want to learn... but hey... I rather like the idea of Granny coding Python). ;-) * Can we demonstrate an obvious progression from Mu's (simple) implementation to a similar feature in an editor to which the user is likely to graduate? For example, the visual debugger is very simple, but looks similar enough to a "proper" debugger in a professional IDE that a beginner graduating to such an environment won't feel out of their depth. Once a feature is "in" a lot of time and effort is spent making it as simple yet useful as possible. This is likely to be the first time someone will have used such a feature and we need to ensure that the intention is clear, the use is obvious and the outcome useful from the perspective of the learner/teacher. We also have a "rule of three" when it comes to "nice to have" features... if three people independently ask for something we try to implement it (a good example being toggling on/off of commenting).

ntoll 8y ago

Thank you! The rational for deciding features is three-fold: * A positive answer to, "is it going to make it easy for a beginner to write, execute and change code?" is the first requirement (we check this with user research -- I've observed lessons, code clubs and other beginner-related activities as well as interviewed teachers and learners to find out how they react). * Alternatively, we checked the features the Raspberry Pi Foundation had feedback about. For instance, the zoom in/out buttons were one of the most requested features from teachers in feedback to the RPi education team. When I demoed this to teachers for the first time there were gasps of amazement (which made me smile, given what a simple / easy to implement feature this is). This is extraordinarily useful in a classroom situation and for learners who may have a visual impairment (such as older learners with bad eyesight... a group I had never initially thought would want to learn... but hey... I rather like the idea of Granny coding Python). ;-) * Can we demonstrate an obvious progression from Mu's (simple) implementation to a similar feature in an editor to which the user is likely to graduate? For example, the visual debugger is very simple, but looks similar enough to a "proper" debugger in a professional IDE that a beginner graduating to such an environment won't feel out of their depth. Once a feature is "in" a lot of time and effort is spent making it as simple yet useful as possible. This is likely to be the first time someone will have used such a feature and we need to ensure that the intention is clear, the use is obvious and the outcome useful from the perspective of the learner/teacher. We also have a "rule of three" when it comes to "nice to have" features... if three people independently ask for something we try to implement it (a good example being toggling on/off of commenting).