Hacker News Reader

Comment by patja | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing. I love the education licensing! I've been teaching with Scratch and MinecraftEdu/ComputerCraft (which also uses Lua) and this looks like a promising addition to my classroom tech stack. Extra-cool that it is DRM-free and doesn't require an account to use...these sources of friction can really negatively impact classroom productivity for students age 8 - 12.

Frankly if it requires an account I flat out won't use it in the classroom unless it is really simple and complies with COPPA (like Scratch accounts, especially the new classroom accounts)

View on HN

Yeah, the guy behind PICO-8 is big on education and having the whole thing as accessible to children as possible.

There are a lot of people using it to introduce their children to game development and programming in general, and it's (supposedly) a blast for both them and the parents. I always felt that while our PCs have gotten 100x as powerful, they paid a big price in accessibility for actually getting stuff done on them when you're 10.

For adults, PICO-8 has just about the right amount of restrictions to keep you productive while still letting you create something worthwhile.

Exactly, the C=64 begged you to create something when it booted up to a BASIC prompt. We've come 2 steps forward 1 step backward with current devices. More kids have these in their hands, but they are harder to create with than ever.

Why are accounts a problem? Because kids are always forgetting their passwords? My understanding is that chromebooks are pretty popular in schools now, they require passwords.

Directing 30 kids to login and get authorized means an entire period of no productivity. And then you still may have problems the next day. Also there's legal issues with storing personal info about students.

I just don't get why pico-8 itself isn't free software. :(

So the guy who wrote it can pay his rent? I'd love for him to share the source code, but I'm happy to pay for it.

There's more to pico8 than just a bit of software. There's a community, a games database, updates and support. The alternative is ad based revenue, and quite frankly I and possibly others wouldn't use pico if it were ad based.

You're also free to sell your software, which you cant even do with unity without a royalty.

Plus, there seems to be a small recent trend of releasing games for free and charging a small donation amount for an instruction manual, as has been done with The Lair[1] and Galactic Wars[2]

[1]: https://krajzeg.itch.io/the-lair [2]: https://volcanobytes.itch.io/galactic-wars

Are you willing to pay his rent for it to be free software?

In the all things considered category it's very inexpensive at $15 for all the stuff that you get. Compared to some movies (ticket, popcorn and a drink at almost twice the cost) I've had much more fun with PICO-8.

For $30 you can get a C.H.I.P computer, game pad AND a copy of Pico-8. So you can go retro on tiny hardware.

I hope you mean free as freedom. I'm not surprised that Pico is not open source. It's still in development and author is really careful about design and building a community around it. Pico is such a creative environment thanks to its limitations and last thing community needs is fifty incompatible forks that would change pallete, resolution or token limit :)

Yes, free as in freedom. The educational character might profit if - for those curious to do so - it would be possible to look into the mechanics of this 'game'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com