Comment by laironald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laironald | Hacker News Reader

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I learned to program on my TI-82 calculator because I couldn't pay attention in my Engrish class. Learning to program allowed me to actually understand the math I was studying and put it into a practical framework. Especially since I was replicating a lot of games that I couldn't afford. It was great.. I was learning and becoming more popular by distributing these games to my classmates.

I played your app with a kid I mentor (he is 7) and he got bored of it very quickly. I think the main problem is that it does not have a clear objective. I can make a dinosaur move, but OK... I get bored super quick. Now. Old school games like the incredible machine... that's an awesome game because its colorful, the objective is clear, there are tons of flexible solutions per stage and it causes him to think with the tools he has in hand.

If you add in a mission based structure, I think that will help in the use and addictive-ness of the application. A thought to consider!

I totally agree. Programming is a hard thing to "teach" when so many of us "learn" it in order to accomplish something.

As the saying goes, some things are taught, and others are learned.

I don't have an iPad, so I couldn't try this app, but these are just my thoughts on kids' applications in general, not the app itself:

I agree that in a learning-based program, a mission of some kind would be helpful, but too often, creators of these apps think it's good enough to put in a smiling dinosaur, or a silly animal friend and that'll do the trick. It does not.

I have a 7 year old, and he is just starting to like to "create" on the computer. He loves Sploder.com for creating games right now, but programming doesn't interest him much. If I told him to move a dinosaur across the screen he'd look around for his 4 year old brother who still likes smiling dinosaurs. At 7, which I think is a good early age to start programming, they are already into monster trucks, clone wars, and big time action. No more cutesy stuff. If that dinosaur didn't devour Jedi's, I don't think he'd like it much.

Agreed that having a mission or goal is important.

What comes to mind for me is a game called the Island of Dr. Brain that I played as a kid.

There was a section in the game where you would input a bunch of directional commands to send a robot through a maze. Then you would "run" the program and see if the robot made it to the end.

Of course, this didn't teach me how to program, but it did teach me how to think in an input/output sense--input these instructions and this thing happens--in a way that I hadn't previously learned in school, and the idea of finishing the maze helped the game hold my attention. Game mechanics...well, they work.

FWIW I'm female and I was never put off by the fact that neither Dr. Brain, nor the legos I had, etc., were geared towards girls.

That said, what you have seems like a really good start and I'm very much looking forward to experimenting with the app.

Thanks for the insight. The reason the dinosaur is a bit cutesy is that we wanted to appeal to both genders. A dinosaur devouring jedi might get boys interested but would probably turn off girls. Unfortunately it seems difficult to appeal to both girls and boys at that age.

Thanks, I do agree that it needs more goals to be built in, especially if we want it to become stickier and more addictive. The incredible machine sounds cool, I will chcek it out. Our idea with the first product was to see how far people could get with just the plain platform before building in more complex mechanics.

From our user testing I think 7 is probably a little young for the app. 9-11 seems to be more of the sweet spot where they want to play games but can go off on their own without much structure.

Thanks for the feedback!

As an aside -- I picked up Scribblenauts on iOS recently. It's not quite as good as I remember the Incredible Machine -- but it's got a lot of the fun "let me come up with a weird solution to this problem" puzzles. Worth the $2 if you haven't got it.

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