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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

Your text notation was:

  move(.up)

What does the `.` do? Why can't it just be:

  move(up)

What purpose do the parentheses have? Are they essential or optional?

Why not:

  move up

Ok, you wanted it to be like a "real" language, I guess? Look at Logo and Basic. They largely eschewed punctuation (not entirely) for text and newlines and meaningful names:

  pen down
  forward 100
  right 90
  forward 50
  pen up

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OP here.

So yes, we could have gone the "move up" route. In fact, we did at one point! Even then though, icons were far and away less intimidating.

The problem is, real programming languages don't eschew punctuation, Logo included (once you include loops and such). AND our primary goal was to get kids familiar with reading real looking code (in this case, Swift).

The last option would be to start with "move up"s, and then introduce punctuation later... but then players would get confused as to why punctuation, unneeded before, suddenly becomes required?

Finding the middle ground of jumping from icons to textual code (with punctuation) resolved all of these issues best.

And yes, we've read Mindstorms ;)

Fair enough. I still disagree with your conclusion. Text isn't keeping kids from coding, throwing them at Swift's text (in your case) was. A simpler and more forgiving syntax, or a UI (a very capable IDE in this case) that walks them through the syntax (showing them only the valid options at any given point) since you chose a relatively complex syntax would also have helped. You achieved that via pictographs transition via pictographs, which ought to be effective (you won't be changing the rules of the game on them, from their perspective, just the notation used).

Pictographs are useful, and effective. I won't deny that. But kids can, and have, learned to code with textual languages when those languages were more effectively chosen and developed for the task of teaching kids. It's unreasonable to make such a strong claim.

We could make the same claim about math and kids (Notation is Keeping Kids from Mathing!), and it would be superficially true, if you started kids off with a notation like geometric algebra (bi-vectors, tri-vectors, multi-vectors, oh my!), instead of arithmetic.

The point I want to stress is that text is keeping kids from coding. Like I said, even with punctuation-less text, the game was deemed difficult. Simpler and forgiving syntax simply would not help. The IDE in the game is actually extremely forgiving and could just as well walk players through the syntax, but interest levels then drop off. This is the difference between in theory and in practice.

Yes there are kids that had no problem with text or without text. Of course kids can and have learned to code with textual languages. Same with math.

The main idea here is that you can get an even larger population of kids doing math and coding, and engaging, by adopting pictographs first. As demonstrated in DragonBox. As seen in our own testing.

Arbitrary syntax rules. Why would they be surprised that people find it confusing?

> What does the `.` do? Why can't it just be:

> move(up)

One of the latter pictures shows "swift syntax", so I expect that's that: .up is a shortcut for a variant in a sum type, as it is in Swift.

Not knowing Swift, I would've guessed something similar. But that hardly makes it a suitable language to dump on kids. For an educational language, you need to start off small with intuitively sensible constructs, and build up.

You can move towards that syntax, but you can hardly start there.

EDIT:

Actually, I'm going to make a stronger statement. You shouldn't make an educational video game, and particularly an educational programming game, until you've read Mindstorms and learned what Papert and others studied last century.

I thought the same thing when I saw this.

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