Kids can now learn to code with Pocky, the delicious Japanese snack | Hacker News Reader

Kids can now learn to code with Pocky, the delicious Japanese snack

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87 pointslegodt63 comments

It's like mit scratch. Except the underlying purpose is to sell junk food, the only sprite you can control is a corporate mascot, and you do so alone instead of in a social platform.

The focus on problem solving may be good for helping kids learn and practice solving problems procedurally. The free form nature of scratch gives a lot of freedom for goofing off, which can be a good thing.

http://scratch.mit.edu

While you didn't say so explicitly, you sound disparaging of this initiative in favour of Scratch being better in every way.

Scratch is great and noble and better in every way as an isolated programming learning tool, but it's worth noting the reach and marketability of Pocky to get kids interested in the whole scene.

You (parents, kids, non-CS-oriented teachers and mentors) aren't going to find and use Scratch without the prime directive of "I want a kid-friendly programming learning tool".

But now you can get the kids Pocky, which you may have gotten anyway since no kid is going to complain about that, and they can learn something meaningful and cool with a character that has context they know and appreciate, unlike scratch's characters that exist in their bubble. Actually being able to impact a much larger audience even with a less ideal experience, is net worth much more than a stellar tool that cannot break past a high activation barrier and caters to a very tiny audience. Like Settlers of Catan for introducing people to board games outside Monopoly, and IFLS (I Fucking Love Science) for getting people interested in space, biology, etc. These seem like perverted contractions of beautiful things, but at the end of the day they get more people interested and that's a good thing.

I for one remember countless mornings reading and learning the backs of the cereal boxes as I had breakfast getting ready for school, and those mornings would have been so much more productive building Pocky programs, but there was no way I was going to fire up Scratch and create programs there.

Pocky has been expanding into the US. It used to only be available in Nijiya Markets, at a big markup over the price in Japan. Now it's in US movie theaters.

Maybe we'll get Calorie Mate food blocks next. Programming with Calorie Mate could become a thing.

The "lay out a pattern with physical objects, take a picture, analyze, and build program" approach is interesting. Like most forms of visual programming, it won't scale, but it's cute.

Now someone into Minecraft should build something where you build with Legos, take a picture, and import into Minecraft.

> It used to only be available in Nijiya Markets

I'm going to anal-retentively nitpick you and proclaim that Pocky was available in places like Yaohan (now defunct) [1] before Nijiya [2] even existed. ;)

[1] First US store in 1979 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaohan

[2] First store in 1986 http://www.nijiya.com/about-us

In California, it's been sold by the big grocery store chains for years.

I've never been to a Nijiya Market but I first saw Pocky in the US in about 2001.

I don't know what Nijiya Markets are, but I had pocky here in the U.s. back in the 1980s. Yes, it was from an Asian grocery store.

If you could do that with the actual Minecraft legos (or just legos in general, but the minecraft legos are the write size and shape already), that would be killer. Probably have to take an angled sideview and a top view, at least. But yeah, would be very cool.

I just went to the supermarket here in Japan to hunt down some of these Pocky. At least the ones they had did not promote this, so they are using the candy programming app as a promotion to get people to buy the candies, but the candies in store are not promoting programming.

as popular Pocky is in Japan, Japan isn't going to go through inventory everywhere as fast as a lot of countries eat sweet snacks. They actually eat sensibly there. Expect the stock to replenish at slower pace.

Not sure why you are being down voted, I see a lot lower amount of people eating food like that here compared to Australia.

I am going to look for one of these packs though :-)

The Japanese are raising a generation of kids who will dominate the international code eating competitions.

It looks like a bad idea to bind the concept of having fun programming with eating sweets.

Pocky is available in most supermarkets in the UAE. It's an amazing snack food to be frank. Great to see it on HN!

I just bought four special imported flavors the other day and I don't feel guilty at all for it.

Pocky is great.

This sounds pretty cool though.

Kids should be outside playing and interacting with other kids, not coding and gobbling candy.

I was one of those kids who stayed glued to a computer indoors and had all my friends online. Now I have a career and friends across the globe to thank for it. Not every person should follow a prescribed path.

How often do you socially interact with those global friends, in person? I'm all for learning awesome computer skills, but there is a time to be a child, and a time to be an adult. I wouldn't exchange growing up in the woods with BMX bikes, skateboards, and vine swings with the neighborhood kids. For sitting behind a computer all summer vacation, messaging people on the internet. I now have a career, and friends all over the world as well.

In person? That's difficult for me since I'm not often able to travel to Finland, the UK, Egypt, etc. I interact with my online friends nearly daily, online. My point was that I would of never have met such diverse people early on had I not grown up around a computer + Internet. Nor would I have necessarily been able to get a job programming right out of high school that helped pay for my college education. I'm not claiming my path was superior in any way, only that there's more than one way through life.

Of course you would have, just like the rest of us have friends all over the world now. I respect your decisions, and I'm glad you're doing well however I'm not going to agree spending your youth indoors was a good choice. There is no argument for what this type of lifestyle is doing to this current generation. They are basically incapable of socially interacting and dating.

> There is no argument for what this type of lifestyle is doing to this current generation. They are basically incapable of socially interacting and dating.

I'm not downvoting you, but it seems this comes off as a sweeping generalization without any support. If you could at least back up your point with some basis for your statement (ie a reference to something), it would probably help to clarify what you're talking about.

It's almost as if people can have very different upbringings and lifestyles and still do well in life.

But then they'll eat the snacks and be unable to play. What if you use similarly shaped objects like pens and erasers?

They'll just have to buy more Pockys!

Reminds me of Calvin eating boxes and boxes of "Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs" to get the flying beanie: https://chrisstich.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ca4.gif

Kids learning to code will save the world.

It looks like this translates Pocky in different positions to lines of code and then executes that code. This is too many levels of abstraction even for me to make sense of as a professional programmer... I like where their heart is but I think this would be a terrible introduction to coding.

Looks to me like an opportunity for a TV show spinoff - "Are you smarter than a 5th grader eating snacks with a smartphone?"

There are many similar programs/games, where you program through icons instead. There is some science behind suggesting there is some transfer to real world programming from that.

As far as I recall, children can learn "Computational Thinking" without having to concentrate on the often heavy syntax of programming.

I agree with you that setting up candy on a table, to take a photo of it and then getting some game-character to move accordingly, sounds a bit far fetched and might not give enough to actually learn programming. But it could definitely work to some extent, and if nothing else it sounds like a great markething scheme.

damnit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12234079

But does it compile to Javscript?

I'm not sure that a brand of chocolate-covered carbohydrates sponsoring sedentary behavior like coding is something that should be celebrated.

Hours spent coding should be followed or broken up by physical activity, not sugary treats.

Something like Pokemon Go but for coding would be nice.

You have to walk to single step the program counter, and run to execute your code at full speed. Then you can catch your breath at breakpoints.

That would be a lot healthier than a high fructose visual programming language like Pocky.

>Hours spent coding should be followed or broken up by physical activity, not sugary treats.

Yeah, we should force kids to go run laps around the block every time they complete a few dozen lines, or master a new concept. That'll motivate them to learn!

Well, you need to fuel your brain somehow. Salad ain't gonna cut it. ;).

> Hours spent coding should be (...) broken up by physical activity

Please don't. It's hard enough to find two or three hours of uninterrupted time as an adult. Kids and teenagers can pull off impressive feats of quick learning and skill acquisition in big part because they have long stretches of uninterrupted time. Don't take away the opportunity they have.

It's more important to be healthy than to be a great programmer, we should be encouraging physical activity

For you, maybe. I understand that fitness is growing to become a new mainstream religion in the West, but not everyone wants to participate in this.

That said, I'm not saying one should not have a healthy lifestyle. Sure, encourage more physical activity. But for the love of Great Maker, do not break up the time kids spend on intellectual tasks or hobbies into small chunks. You can do fitness rituals in 15-minutes stretches, but you can't do anything that requires any kind of creativity or focus in that time.

You can do fitness rituals in 15-minutes stretches, but you can't do anything that requires any kind of creativity or focus in that time.

I do my programming in chunk of twenty minutes at a time.

Complete focus, no distraction.

If you mean Pomodoros, then it doesn't count - the whole idea of "Pomodoro break" is to be short and spent in such a way as to not really break you out of focus.

If you can just sit down at random times and immediately code for 20 minutes with full focus, please tell us your secret. It sounds like a superhuman skill.

What do you do in between?

I do the same thing, 30 minute stints, 3-5 minute breaks. Occasionally if I'm really rolling I'll just keep going but I generally make sure to stop for breaks. The key is to do things that won't get you mentally distracted, has a good stopping point, and lets you mentally rest.

Good breaks:

- I walk around the building

- Watch a short comedy youtube video

- Scroll through memes/comics

- Read blog posts, usually ones that aren't too detail-oriented and with good stopping points (Coding Horror is a good example)

- Listen to an instrumental music song (no lyrics), close my eyes, maybe get some fresh air.

Bad breaks:

- Start a long email

- Other projects.

- Anything mentally taxing or stressful (don't pay bills on break, don't try to figure out what you'll have for dinner)

- Read an exciting book that you don't want to put down

Doing this helps me stay focused all day. Over an 8 hour shift I take breaks for approx 48-80 minutes (plus lunch), so at most a little over an hour is wasted--versus burning out after just a few hours, writing bad code that I then spend the next day cleaning up.

This further translates into me being able to work some more on some side projects when I get home without getting burnt out--and not always programming, but other mental work like writing, art, meal planning, etc.

I'd question how effective a 15-minute fitness session is; it usually takes me that long to get really warmed up, not to mention the time it takes to get cleaned up after I'm done.

It really depends on who you ask. Some people may prioritize being the best programmer they can be over being healthy, but it's undeniable the connection between healthy body and a healthy mind.

As I am a fan of the lazy programmer theory, we should be encouraging people to be lazy now, so that the biochemical effects of physical activity may be effortlessly emulated by a brilliant technical workaround later. The more smart people we have working on exercise-free health, the better.

Your selfish act of keeping your own body healthy with literally dozens of minutes of pointless kilocalorie-burning and wasted watts every week is a Nash equilibrium choice. Think of all the benefits to society that could be realized if no one ever needed to exercise to stay healthy. But if you're healthy now, you have no particular incentive to cheat death. You're taking brains out of that innovation lottery.

Come on, people. We can automate people out of their paying jobs, but can't automate exercise out of existence?!

Perhaps there is a sort of cognitive dissonance in play. People who have remained healthy their entire lives by disciplined application of exercise would undoubtedly feel betrayed and devalued when people can achieve the same results with drugs and implants.

Programming and doing exercise are not entirely rivalrous tasks, but I can get a lot done in 3 hours if I am completely focused and entirely uninterrupted (even from self-sourced interruptions).

Everyone's a critic, huh. Kids will spend time eating snacks and playing video games, as the past couple few decades have proven. Making those video games intellectual is an improvement. Sometimes the answer doesn't have to be the ideal, it just has to be better than the status quo.

Somebody should develop an free open source high fiber visual programming language based on celery stalks, cucumber slices, carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes, avocado slices, and radishes. That will keep your expressions regular!

Needs to be gluten-free to maintain functional purity.

Here's how you represent eight in Binary Corgi Digits.

https://i.imgur.com/KKc8qfU.jpg

Make successful. Now gimme 10.

Maybe Snapple or Dove Chocolates could add some programming related knowledge under their labels / caps. That'd be kind of fun and apparently you get an easy press release out of it.

From reading the article it sounds like Pocky did something much more interesting than that. They are doing object recognition to use the candy as symbols in a programming language. Sounds a bit different from what you suggest.

An edible programming language would be a great promotion for the international roll-out of the new Unicode version of Post Alpha-Bits Cereal.

They could base it on PostScript, so it had nice graphics.

Just please don't call it paw-key. It's poe-key (rhymes with low-key) although in truth there's a gap between poe & key

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gIrqQhwkM

And yes I know someone is going to complain it's not English. So what. Neither is the pronounciation of pizza. If you can bother to say pee-tsa instead of piz-ah you can bother to say poe-key instead of paw-key

What about pronunciation?)

To be that nitpicky asshole, "pizza" as an example doesn't really do anything to argue your case because there's plenty of non-English-language brands that Americans typically pronounce with an English pronunciation (Volkswagen, IKEA, Nutella, etc.)

Just say ポッキー and you'll say it right every time.

i'm going to keep saying pawkey.

It doesn't matter if people understand you. It's fine if you want to say it like it's said in Japanese, but don't be pedantic and make others feel bad for saying it a specific way.

Do you correctly pronounce "Nikon" as "Nee con", then explain to your English-speaking friends that that's how it's pronounced in Japan even though Nikon marketing doesn't even use that pronunciation in English-speaking countries?

Do you correctly pronounce "champagne" the French way around your English-speaking friends, even though the French pronunciation sounds almost nothing like "sham pain" so of course you have to explain yourself every single time you say the word?

Does actual phlegm emerge from your throat whenever you correctly pronounce the Greek letter chi at the end of TeX and LaTeX, or do you just say "lay tech" or (god forbid) "lay techs"?

Most importantly, do you say "guh noo slash lin ucks" and go around correcting everyone who doesn't? Because if you do any of these things, please, please, please stop. Please. Please. Seriously, it is so not worth it.

> or do you just say "lay tech" or (god forbid) "lay techs"?

I thought it was "lah tech."

I would love to say all of those words correctly if someone taught me the correct way.

Example: Recently visited France. Learned "framboise" ends with 'z' where as lots of English speaking people some how think the correct French pronunciation is fram-buwa. It's not it's fram-buawz

http://forvo.com/word/framboise/

If someone says Bay-Nay-Nay for Banana or Hey-Ker Neh-wass for Hacker News I'd expect people would correct them. There's a reason we correct people's pronunciations. If we didn't they'd eventually stop being able to communicate. You might have been able to excuse it when it was harder to communicate world wide. now you can talk to at least 1/2 the world from your pocket. No more excuses.

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