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I'm a mentor for a Lego robotics team and have been for years - this year's season will mark my eighth year of Lego Robotics. I love to help the kids learn and

I'm a mentor for a Lego robotics team and have been for years - this year's season will mark my eighth year of Lego Robotics. I love to help the kids learn and I even try to teach them (to some extent) how to code. The thing that gets their interest every time is something physical. I can sit them in front of Scratch for four hours twice a week, or this, or LOGO, or any of a multitude of other solutions, but the two things that never fail to interest them are Lego Mindstorms and my quadcopter. My quadcopter usually catches their attention (wow, a machine that can go over a hundred miles an hour! cool!) but the Lego Mindstorms robot is what keeps them interested. This is because they have no idea of how to build a quadcopter that can go as fast as mine (which is reasonable, considering it took eight months to build mine - it's among the fastest in the world and may even be the fastest) but they do know how to drag and drop blocks to make the robot go. My point is: there has to be some kind of moment where you snag the kids' attention. I don't see any moment here that would make the kids excited. Seeing my quadcopter soar through the sky at over a hundred miles an hour fascinates them. Seeing the robot move across the board, shoot projectiles or battle another robot (at their command!) fascinates them. But having a virtual character follow commands in an interface which looks like it came out of a preschool? I doubt it. It looks like this may be targeted towards very young children, but in that case my worry is not that this won't snag their attention (very young children are much more interested in a computer game than my quadcopter) but rather that they'll simply forget about it by the time they learn to read and write (and thus even be able to start reading and writing code.) Here's another comment I made about teaching kids to code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450503

dyarosla 12y ago
I can see the merit in having something that snag's kids' attention. When anyone is intrinsically motivated to understand something, that is the moment when they'll truly look to understand rules and really start learning. I would have to say that the physical devices thing is perhaps your own projection for being the best way of snagging kids' attention- of course, you do work with robotics and quadcoptors, but for many kids, real games (and that means not Scratch or Logo) are what catches attention. LightBot's design starts basic. But the puzzles become quite difficult. From what I've seen, kids associate with the character and first become interested due to that connection, and then are later motivated to complete puzzles because each completion actually feels rewarding and something that they truly had to figure out (very few things do that nowadays outside of puzzle games for kids). So perhaps physical toys are your cup of tea, and they may be for many kids, but just think about how many kids today would rather play Minecraft than play Lego Mindstorms. It's not a physical contraption and can be seen as an educational tool in many regards. I would argue that physical toys aren't always the best motivators for kids in the same way that video games aren't for others.

dyarosla 12y ago

I can see the merit in having something that snag's kids' attention. When anyone is intrinsically motivated to understand something, that is the moment when they'll truly look to understand rules and really start learning. I would have to say that the physical devices thing is perhaps your own projection for being the best way of snagging kids' attention- of course, you do work with robotics and quadcoptors, but for many kids, real games (and that means not Scratch or Logo) are what catches attention. LightBot's design starts basic. But the puzzles become quite difficult. From what I've seen, kids associate with the character and first become interested due to that connection, and then are later motivated to complete puzzles because each completion actually feels rewarding and something that they truly had to figure out (very few things do that nowadays outside of puzzle games for kids). So perhaps physical toys are your cup of tea, and they may be for many kids, but just think about how many kids today would rather play Minecraft than play Lego Mindstorms. It's not a physical contraption and can be seen as an educational tool in many regards. I would argue that physical toys aren't always the best motivators for kids in the same way that video games aren't for others.