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Comment by da39a3ee | Hacker News Reader

This is madness. I'm trying the demo and it is completely incomprehensible to me. This would have been incredibly frustrating to me as a child -- I would want them to stop speaking in metaphors and tell me what the fuck they were trying to teach me. Since then I have acquired a scientific PhD and taught myself undergrad computer science and math, and I do not understand this lesson.

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Weird because my 8yo understood it and loved it

Really? I'm not too knowledgable about 8-yr olds and I'm certainly not telling you what to do with yours, but if you were to get them to explain what they learned about the binary counting system you feel that it would make sense and reveal that some underlying concepts were genuinely understood?

You can see my other comment on here, but hours after the demo I asked my 8yo to explain binary to my wife. He explained how 101 in binary is 5 pretty well.

Forgive me for being naturally suspicious but I would prefer a breathless testimonial from somebody who wasn't affiliated with the project.

That's fair and I don't blame you for being suspicious of my testimonial. I built the widget that's used in the demo. My son didn't play with it until the entire demo lesson was complete. He liked the lesson and learned binary from it -- something we hadn't taught him elsewhere. He asked to do it again on another day. He then went on and did two of our other unreleased lessons on his own and enjoyed them. As a parent and as someone who helped build this, I was excited.

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