programming-for-kids VS twinejs

I can tell you as a dad, it frightens me that the future is coming so fast I cant even see 1 year ahead.

I teach my daughter things from small circuits to assembler, c, python, sql but also basic prompt engineering, how next word predictors work, how surveillance works or how privacy is infringed, how do we pay for the "free" apps, or how to make an idea into something real, also things about how to type fast (at the moment she types with 80wpm) and how to not be afraid of computers and how to just play with them.

Of course, it might turn out that I have wasted her time, but we spend time together, and during this time I also teach her how to learn things.

Honestly I am not sure "what" you are teaching is that important, If I knew how to bake, I would teach her the deep mastery of baking with all my heart.

PS: you can check my teaching progress log here https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pico8+tutorial

Another option is to make a Roblox game, their studio is very accessible and the scripting is quite straight forward (e.g. if you step on this object it moves)

I have spent 2 years teaching my daughter and I thought python and pygame are nice, but we made lots of other games, and lots of turtle based generative art (you can also get some basic game ideas from there, like snake or tictactore or whereiswaldo):

https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

I think the curve of excitement is quite steep at start, and then it gets super boring, so if you can reduce the scope as much as possible, and manage to get to some playable state its amazing, if you use godot or some other engine you can make the game playable on web so he can share it with his friends its really nice.

That looks seriously cool. Just the colors give me goosebumps :)

completely offtopic:

My dream is to build a super cheap child friendly computer, that the kids can build themselves, has a software keyboard that directly polls the gpio pins so that kids can modify their keyboard instead of having a keyboard controller (just so there is less mistery in what happens when a key is pressed). And the OS is something inspired from LEAP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c that allowing you to evaluate code and apply it to your current file. A bit like your LOAD81 but with text.

I have a prototype now: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/... but it has a long way to go.

I think programming is literacy. People who can code can see through the fabric of our world in the same way as people that can read can see different worlds.

Teaching programming is so incredibly difficult, I am trying to teach my daughter, 343 days so far (12 yo, log here: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...) and I am not sure it is a tooling problem at all. The problem seems to be to be able to understand what the student does not understand. And to be able to keep their focus.

I also use a lot of incentives (custom tshirts, vbucks, displate posters etc) to compete with the million developers in snap/facebook/tiktok/epic/etc that are trying to steal and sell every bit of her attention.

I constantly try different methods, we even made programming card games together (like https://punkjazz.org/programming-time/), or downloading music or generating music, writing games with python/lua/c, making autoclickers or bots, pranks, hacking things (e.g. explaining and using the whatsapp url parse bug recently was very fun), playing war games etc, but every day I have to spend a lot of time thinking about what is the "right" next lesson, what does she need to learn to level up.

Learning programming is not a curve at all, it is a staircase and stairs are like walls for some people. It might take 10 years to get to the next level. You can have people programming whole complex programs without having any idea what is going on.

That being said, the future of programming pedagogy and andragogy is very open, and I am very happy for every attempt to try to make a dent in it.

i code for 25 years, i am teaching my daughter (12) now, you can see her progress at https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/book.md , so i have some experience teaching

My daughter(12) started using ChatGPT recently for homework stuff, but she also asked it some personal things about a friendship situation with her best friend, which made me think about how dangerous it is to take a friendship advice from a llm.

I thought its important to explain what it is and how it works, so I made our lesson yesterday be about ChatGPT (we spend every day doing a bit of coding and I log it in this repository):

https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

Today before school I asked her to reflect on what ChatGPT is, and she had a pretty good mental model from yesterday's lesson, so at least she doesnt think it has empathy or is telling the 'truth'.

I managed to change 'ChatGPT is giving an answer to a question' to 'its just guessing the next word, but it understands deeply how words are connected'.

We did a lot of exercises where I asked her to think what would the next word be given a sequences of words just by thinking about their probabilities, like: 'Your name is ChatGPT. What is your' and the next word is going to be probably 'name' and then '?' and then 'My'

How do you explain it to your kids? Do you worry about them using it?

Since OpenAI makes it super easy to login with gmail (and her gmail is a kid account), I didn't even know she had a user there until she told me, but I think most kids in her class use it without their parents knowing.

you can also just go for python with pygame zero (this is the approach i took with my daughter when she was 9, i logged the progress here: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/book.md )

Hi

I am teaching my daughter how to code, and now I am running various pranks on her computer. For example, every time you alt+tab there is a weird beep sound, or the computer randomly restarts every 10 minutes, or after 10 minutes in Minecraft the keyboard presses 'W' for 3 seconds, or I move her mouse remotely and etc... (some are extremely evil, like stopping half the internet 128.0.0.0/1 or 0.0.0.0/1 every 10 minutes for 3 seconds)

I made a whole deck of cards (each prank fits on one playing card): https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/projects/panic/cards-small.pdf

I sell the decks for 5€ (e.g.: https://punkx.org/c-pointer-game/ or https://punkx.org/punk0/) but for this one, I am not even sure what kind of lawyer should I talk to, to make sure I am not liable if a user of the deck damages someone's computer. I also aded epilepsy warning on the cards that are very visual (like randomly rotating the screen 90 degrees).

The deck is also licensed CC BY 4.0, so anyone can re-print it, and are the people printing it and sharing it liable as well? The warning I have now is made by me and you can see it on the first card, but I will also paste it here:

    WARNING! WARING! WARNING!

i am teaching my daughter since she was 10 and i am logging each day in a book https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/book.md so far she is making great progress, you might get some ideas from it

I think you and your kid would have fun designing a Choose Your Own Adventure game in Twine. https://twinery.org/

FWIW, there are a bunch of simple modern GUI builders, including GUI builders for the web, but none of them are popular, due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that Hypercard hit.

When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts.

Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look exactly like that everywhere."

The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem.

As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.

There's ChoiceScript by Choice Of Games. It's more along the lines of Choose Your Own Adventure. If you're hoping to make something with a fair amount of random events, you might want to check out Twine.

I'm trying to update tweego with the story format harlowe 3.3.7. I've copied the .json and .icon files for Harlowe 3.3.7 from here : https://github.com/klembot/twinejs/tree/develop/public/story-formats

Here are 2 interactive story game engines: * https://www.renpy.org/ * https://twinery.org/

You use something like https://twinery.org/ for creating the dialogues, and then write abstract code to handle that.

The engine here https://twinery.org/