Ruby4Kids: Another initiative to teach kids with Ruby | Hacker News Reader

Ruby4Kids: Another initiative to teach kids with Ruby

thechangelog.com

35 pointsmacco15 comments

I'll be damned if I have to start listening to my daughter interrupt my technical conference calls with "you know, you guys could have this already done with a few lines of ruby"

In case you missed it, there was more discussion about Ruby4Kids here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158231

Not sure if everyone has seen:

http://www.railsmentors.org/

But it's another worthwhile project.

OK, I thought this might be cool - so I clicked on over to Ruby4kids [http://ruby4kids.com/ruby4kids]. The first link is to Gosu [http://code.google.com/p/gosu/wiki/RubyTutorial]. This isn't for kids. The first heading is 1. Overriding Window's callbacks.

Gosu isn't for kids. But that doesn't mean that people can't use Gosu to teach kids, with proper instruction.

>"Gosu isn't for kids"

That's what makes it inappropriate as the first link on Ruby4kids. It's analogous to having dotnet4kids link to:

http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Beginning-Game-...

rather than to this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ff384126.aspx

The more resources to teach kids programming the better! Especially ones which use games, but ugh, += and @ signs on the front page!

I'm sure my kids would get used to the syntax without too much trouble, just like they deal with the idiosyncrasies of the English language, but Python seems like a better language to teach kids with, especially since there's only one way to do something in Python.

I actually (surprise!) disagree. The primary reason is this: Ruby's flexibility as a language lets you give them simpler libraries. You have to consider the language as a whole, not just the base language.

For example, Shoes just wouldn't really be possible in Python. At least, it'd end up being much worse.

In the end, though, it's really just partisan squabbling. Let's worry about getting as many kids as possible exposed to programming before we start optimizing, eh?

Kids are pretty good about malleability. Legos > jigsaw puzzles.

I was looking through some of those videos and I felt a very strong pang of envy. These kids have videos that will live forever on the internet of them programming. I wish I had that from when I was 6 to 13ish (before I started coding for money).

@steveklabnik Google helped with http://hackety-hack.com right? Is this an extension of that?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'Google helped.'

Ruby4Kids has no relationship with Hackety. We just share the same goals.

Didn't Google sponsor someone for gSummer of Code to work on Hackety?

Ahhh. No. Google said "Summer of Code will not have any Ruby projects," so the Ruby community put a bunch of money together and did Ruby Summer of Code. Same thing, no Google.

What age of kids does it target?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com