Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedp | Hacker News Reader

I agree. As a parent of a kid interested in programming and math, I would only suggest replacing "for kids" with "for beginning learners." From what I've seen, kids over 7 and grown-ups are pretty much on even footing as beginning programmers. Additionally, "for kids" has a trivializing ring to it, like they're not full humans; my daughter does not like anything with a "for kids" label on it. (If only "Python for Kids" were not called that!)

View on HN

I totally agree. In fact, I might even go further to say that this is really for anyone to think new thoughts regardless of age. Here's what I mean:

I've been programming for over a decade and the first time I read the code for the bouncing ball example I had basically no idea what it meant. I could sort of tell that there was something drawing circles but that was about it.

By dragging the constants around and seeing every frame change (across time, not just a single frame) you're able to get an intuition about what each line of code is doing.

I'm not a child nor a beginning programmer and using this tool was super useful for me to gain insight on how it works.

The original Learnable Programming article is a response to the work that we did in building the Khan Academy Computer Science platform - which is exactly that. An educational real-time environment for writing and manipulating code: https://www.khanacademy.org/cs

I love Khan Academy and the CS platform in particular. I think it would be amazing if it was possible to put Choc, or a tool like it, on some of the KA lessons. Being able to step through time (or view all of time in the case of animation) and inspect values are both really useful features for helping folks learn to think procedurally. I find that learning to think procedurally is often harder than learning the syntax.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com