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Comment by Sirened | Hacker News Reader

>7yo was making a number guessing game, and to display a two-digit number we had to make two sprites that had 10 "costumes" (0-9) then do modular math to select the costume for each digit

This, imo, is what makes Scratch a great education platform. It has a couple of very easy to use primitives (such as displaying and moving sprites) and leaves you to build whatever else you need by abstracting things on top of it. This teaches you one of the most foundational programming skills: how to do something complicated with only weird, rudimentary tools.

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This is also a good point. Scratch isn't designed to make coding easy so much as conceptually understandable.

That's not it, otherwise you'd make the little ones play with a Turing machine.

Turing machines are about being mathematically tractable right not about understanding right?

I just think there are so many other forms of distraction today. Young kids are carrying around cell phones, texting their friends. It’s that or they are doing something on Tiktok.

They don’t have time to hack like that anymore.

Yes true for most people ( I am 13, Started programming in Java with 10 ) but some also do this other stuff. Like I installed ubports on my second phone today ( Writing this on it )

Never heard of ubports. Looks interesting. A 40 year old just learned something from a 13 year old. If this is how you're spending your free time, then you have a bright future ahead of you. Keep it up!

You should consider this interaction as an opportunity to also revisit your ageism. I'm all for encouraging young people, and OP seems a really bright 13 years old person, for sure. But try to keep condescension out of the way. As anybody with children can tell you, we all learn from them all the time. It's not something surprising.

Maybe don't throw -isms around so lightly, eh?

I find hard to interpret "A 40 yo learned something from a 13 yo" in a non ageist way. Seems that people disagree, but nobody has provided a counterpoint.

Actually, the comment in question would have been perfect encouragement in my view just by removing that phrase.

Just felt like a bit of an overreaction to me.

I've only ever heard that term to mean bias against people considered too old for a given activity.

That's the most commonly discussed form. There are others as in https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/ageism

postmarket OS is also fun, and a bit more Linuxy...

I think you are the exception, not the rule. I teach Scratch, MakeCode, and Microbit to kids at my daughters school. Only a small fraction take it serious and get into tinkering and making stuff.

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