csmeyer

Thanks, tim! charlie@pickcode.io whenever you have feedback

$5/month for unlimited lessons. That fact should be put on the landing page, it's on the todo list

Click the “Home” button on the sidebar while logged in and you’ll see a new project button. The sidebar might be default hidden on mobile

Will do

Functions are at least first class! We have map and filter on lists, for example. I'd love to add some more advanced curriculum that focuses on teaching a more functional style.

Jumping on the license plate topic, here’s a post I put up in 2022 on the distribution of letters/numbers in Massachusetts plates

https://blog.charliemeyer.co/mathematical-theory-of-license-...

I post about coding education and some other miscellaneous math/tech things here: https://blog.charliemeyer.co

This comment should be a post itself!

Maybe I wasn't clear in the article. 100% is a nominal goal (give everyone a chance!) but obviously not everyone will like it and that's not a problem.

I had no particular plan, my point in that sentence was that 2 years was on the shorter end of the distribution of how long I expected to stay. I'm leaving now because I think I can make a bigger impact on student learning building a product which incorporates what I've learned these past two years.

This link: https://type.method.ac/# on the page is absolutely fantastic. You have to drag letters until the kerning is proper. Will be checking out the rest of the resources soon!

I made Pickcode, where kids can make chatbots and graphic designs using a hybrid visual/text programming language. https://app.pickcode.io/courses has 5 lessons (todo: make many more), I would say the ones listed as beginner could be fun to pair on with a 7 year old!

What projects do your kids complete on replit? Are they following youtube tutorials or first party content from replit?

When people use scratch with their kids, what tutorials do they follow? Do they try and figure things out from first principles, or are their popular content creators who make stuff? How do people transition their kids from scratch to Python? From my experience teaching, it seems like it's really hard for kids to make that transition.

Also moved in to teaching high school CS. It's hard but the kids are great. I've found that it's a lot less about doing a great job explaining loops or whatever and more about mentorship and getting kids excited about the topic. If anyone's interested in making the switch my email is in my bio, I'd be happy to chat.

How does this compare to something like bear blog?

My cursory exploration here would suggest this is possible

https://imgur.com/a/YClX6xD

Going to try and play a few rounds with these rules

Scroll down to the section on Conscious Realism. This presents a mathematical basis for what "base reality" is: a graph of conscious agents, and our reality is merely a projection of that graph (we perceive elements of the projection, not the base graph). This to me is a much more powerful idea than the Ted talk which is a bit clickbaity.

I would say 2/3 of my luck in the past year has been a result of sharing work and writing on HN, following up with commenters and being slightly more aggressive with networking. Probably not a coincidence that it's been a very lucky year.

Being lucky at all is predicated on being in a good state physically and mentally, which I'm very fortunate to be in at the moment. I think one thing we should all think about is how we can not just maximize our own luck, but use that luck to get other people in a good state as well.

Futurecoder looks awesome, if you are looking for something for younger kids that’s more advanced than scratch I made pickcode.io

It’s frame based editing (draggable statements, free form expressions), and you can do turtle graphics and chatbots. I have 4 free tutorials online, if you want more you can email me, my address is in my bio on here

I love those ideas for assignments. Humans will get boxed out of most programming tasks, but the questions that you raise will (probably?) be the last to go

Gidget seems a bit more of a game with a goal for your program, while Pickcode is meant to allow kids to be creative and make their own projects once they’re guided through the basics

Thanks for the note on the signup form, it’s just a google form at the moment so idk what might be going on.

Remote collaboration and a game editor are on the horizon so teach your nephew a few things in the meantime and you’ll be good to go :-)

Thanks for the feedback. Things are a work in progress, and this one tutorial does not attempt to explain in detail all of the requisite programming terminology and concepts.

Could you link your dissertation? Would love to see some of your findings.

I think it's great that they've identified cursor placement as one of the trickier aspects of coding on a phone. The joystick is a great idea, I found it a bit hard to use at first (kind of flies around the screen) but the little buttons are good for getting your cursor inside a string literal, for example.

I'm excited to get my students trying this, many of them only have a school issued iPad. I'm also curious about how well the autocomplete can be tuned. I think right now suggestions are a bit rough, I'm hopeful they'll start using language server suggestions soon. (Something like System.out.println, you should definitely get out as an option after System.)

Pickcode is meant for K-12 education as an alternative to block programming. The end goal is to have a WYSIWG editor for web apps with behavior defined using the visual programming language.

MBScript looks great and I’d love to talk about your learnings from it. My contact is on the pickcode.io landing page if you want to chat!

Shameless plug for my hybrid visual/text pl, Pickcode, which matches what you're talking about

Demo programs: https://app.pickcode.io/playground

I like the idea of simplifying the main method, but it's honestly not a huge barrier as a high school teacher. Most IDEs will fill in the declaration of main for you, and I think it's perfectly fine to tell students "we'll worry about that later, write your code in the braces" without diving in to all the details. To me, what would be more helpful is an easier way to read input from stdin during a program. I usually give my intro students a static class that wraps Scanner, but it's a bit of a pain.

Scroll down to the first picture

I think you needed to add the plus sign with the mouse rather than typing, but I'll work on making that error clearer or just having it parse the expression for you