This is very impressive technology and I am active in this space. Very active. I make an (unreleased) Steam game that helps users create their own games from no

This is very impressive technology and I am active in this space. Very active. I make an (unreleased) Steam game that helps users create their own games from not knowing how to program. I also (unknowingly) co-authored tools that K12 and university are using to teach game programming. For the time being I will gloss over the fact this might just be a consumer facing product for Google that ends up having nothing to do with younger developers. I'm torn between two ideas: a. Show kids awesome stuff that motivates them to code b. Show kids how to code something that might not be as awesome, but they actually made it On the one hand you want to show kids something cool and get them motivated. What Google is doing here is certainly capable of doing that. On the other hand I want to show kids what they can actually do and empower them. The days of making a game on your own in your basement are mostly dead, but I don't think that means the idea of being someone who can control a large amount of your vision - both technical and non-technical - is important. Not everyone is the same either. I have met kids that would never spend a few hours to learn some Python with pygame to get a few rectangles and sprites on screen that might get more interested if they saw something this flashy. But experience also tells me those kids are extremely less likely to get much value from a tool like this beyond entertainment. I have a 14 year old son myself and I struggle to understand how he sees the world in this capacity sometimes. I don't understand what he thinks is easy or hard and it warps his expectations drastically. I come from a time period where you would grind for hours at a terminal pecking in garbage from a magazine to see a few seconds of crappy graphics. I don't think there should be meaningless labor attached to programming for no reason, but I also think that creating a "cost" to some degree may have helped us. Given two programs to peck into the terminal, which one do you peck? Very few of us had the patience (and lack of sanity) to peck them all.