Code.org and Minecraft team up for an “Hour of Code” tutorial Dec 5-11

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For those of you who are interested in teaching the next generation how to work with computers, this is a big deal. I’ve been teaching four local kids
[See the full post at: Code.org and Minecraft team up for an “Hour of Code” tutorial Dec 5-11]

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If it’s anything like this, I can imagine it’s pretty cool … https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tip_bar=getStarted

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Scratch is wonderful. I started teaching with it and, as my son gets older, I’ll migrate him over. Big reason: Scratch interfaces with Lego Mindstorms, which is the single most important robotics teaching tool in history.

My older son, who’s writing games now, learned so much from Mindstorms. It turns your head around to see how replicated programs can interact – and that’s a capability that’s infused in his games.

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The most popular undergrad course at Harvard is CS50 – Introduction to Computer Science.

They use Scratch for the first problem set, to get everyone, including new non-CS majors with no computer background, familiar with programming concepts. The Professor, David J. Malan is awesome.

I took CS50x, the free self-paced EdX HarvardX online version (same content as on-campus course), as an update to my skills (available here)- https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x

Of course, as expected, they jump right into C programming in the second problem set, LOL…

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Out of the sprites and into the fire….

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LOL, yup!!! Young people are so lucky that they have these tools today. I really wish we had this stuff when I was younger.

The interactive coding processes we have now are impossible to compare to decades ago, when we were punching holes in paper cards, then waiting for a hardcopy printout to fix the expected errors. Re-code. Punch. Submit. Wait. Repeat… That’s why I never became a professional developer.

Even today’s professional developer tools can be really simple to use, and allow you to work at full brain speed while testing and improving your code. No waiting at all for compilers if you use Javascript or Python

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Yesterday, I tried Swift Playground on IOS with my 10 years old son. He loved it so much. It is very well made, with a joyful character moving in a colorful world. The lessons presented to code with real code are amazing. My son picked it up right away, he learned to do functions and realized what a bug was after a few minutes playing.

“Oh that is what is happening when my games are doing weird things. The person made a bug by typing the wrong commands”.

It takes you by the hand so there is no obstacle to quickly start and it is an opportunity to spend a great moment with your kid. My son told me “if I tried this game by myself I would have deleted it after a few minutes because I wouldn’t have understood it, but wow would have I missed something”.

I tried other tools before but I was disappointed by the lack of interesting features for the kid or the difficulty of inventing good small examples of code myself. This game solves all that. Highly recommended. And I don’t work for the company of have any conflict of interest with the product.

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I’ll give it a try. Thanks!

The world needs more games like this…

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Just saw this:

Swift Playgrounds Updated With New Coding Lessons, Hour of Code Challenge

http://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/17/swift-playgrounds-new-coding-lessons/

So Apple’s working with code.org, too. Awright! Our kids will thank us – or our robotic overlords – one of these days.

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