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Comment by matte_black | Hacker News Reader

No Klik & Play?! It was the reason I can say I was building and distributing my own games back in 5th grade!

No Lego Mindstorms!? I was building Robots with six degrees of freedom in middle school!

I had Klik & Play back on Windows 3.1! (And then later The Games Factory on '95.) It was great for a little while but I rapidly got to the point where it felt like it was getting in my way rather than making things easier.

I /wish/ I'd had Lego Mindstorms, always wanted some but we could never afford it.

TGF was definitely what got me started in programming as a kid. Super intuitive to learn and use before I was 'ready' to use a text-based language.

Mindstorms was pretty much a variant of Scratch. Never heard of Klik&Play - I'll check it out, thanks.

Mindstorm is actually a variant of Labview (by National instruments) - which is a flow based prog environment. Different from scratch and it's clones.

The Mindstorms that I remember (~2004, on the RCX 2.0) was nothing like LabVIEW; I haven't played with Scratch, but from what people have shown me of it, it is very similar to how I remember Mindstorms.

I've taught students both mindstorms NXT and Scratch, and they're quite different. Scratch is basically procedural programming with blocks instead of text. Mindstorms has some of that, but variables/data connections are really different and wierd to get your head around if you're already a programmer. I've not used labview so can't compare to that.

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