smj2118

If your cousins have iOS devices they should check out Hopscotch. (http://gethopscotch.com) It works on iPhone and iPad and you can use it to learn to code and make your own games. Full disclosure: I founded Hopscotch. But it's still awesome if I do say so myself :)

Hopscotch | New York, NY ONSITE| Full time Senior Product Manager

At Hopscotch, we’re reinventing programming. We believe that anyone should be able to code.

We are a small team of 8, and we pride ourselves on shipping product. Our CTO came from Pivotal Labs and we love the Pivotal process. We work hard in the office, but everyone has a life outside of work. Folks are continuously impressed with how quickly and efficiently our team gets things done.

Job description here: http://gethopscotch.com/jobs/product

To apply please send an email to jobs@gethopscotch.com with your resume + mention your favorite childhood game.

Would love to hear from some HNers!

What about UIAppearance? You can specify appearance for a UILabel inside a specific container type.

http://nshipster.com/uiappearance/

How did Norvig know about Ratatouille 6 years before it came out?

Agreed, would love to use this to generate markdown!

Our startup <a href='http://www.gethopscotch.com>Hopscotch</a> is in the midst of something similar. We came from NY and have managed to do it very much on the cheap by staying with friends and using miles to get here. I could definitely see a tech scene blossoming here, it's a great environment for coders.

I'm a big fan of the js widgets- jquery-ui is starting to look a bit old-fashioned and the design on the bootstrap widgets looks very clean. If you end up doing anything very complicated you'll end up fighting the css more than it helps you but I like that I can pick and choose modules.

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!

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.

Exactly! The fact that it seems so unattainable to you is the problem we are trying to solve.

Being a programmer myself I know that it can be a challenging field but I also know that it's definitely something kids can do and enjoy as well.

I like the analogy to Legos- not every kid who plays with Legos will grow up to be an architect or civil engineer but they can gain a great deal of enjoyment out of doing a simpler version of what these people do professionally.

I think programmers themselves have a bias against getting started easily. Everyone knows how much they had to struggle to get their environment set up so they expect it to be a hard problem and don't consider it necessary to solve when building an OS. I imagine it's simply not a priority although I wish it was.

That's an interesting comment, it sounds like you've experienced the frustrations of programming first hand. Basically what you're talking about is the issue we want to solve. There will always be frustrations around getting your code working (some would say that's the fun of it) but we hope to create something that will eliminate a lot of the other non-code problems that stop people from moving on to the next step.

What we want to do next is add in a way to publish your code to the web through our app (which may morph into a web app if that turns out to be more appropriate). At that point, in my opinion, a user would be doing real programming since she or he would be creating something in code and distributing it to others for use.

Well, there is a slightly buggy webview version at:

http://gethopscotch.com/index.html

But since it only really works on iPad we decided to release it as an app.

I like underscore.js although I'm not sure if _.each will be faster than jquery or not. http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/#each

I've also heard that the coffeescript implementation of forEach is pretty fast since it uses the old c-style for-loop under the hood.