csmeyer

Thanks for the bug report, I'll get on that!

Thanks for all the feedback! I hope that guided tutorials with starter code and well scoped goals can help for navigating the learning curve and helping on (1,2, 3, 5). (4) is coming soon. Re: (6), did you check out the snake and pong example programs? They use sprites that move in 2D a la Scratch. (7) is one of the things I'm most excited about. I come from a math/data background and I've talked to a physics teacher about doing some modeling in a new microworld. (8) is a good idea!

This response has been great, I appreciate really all the feedback. In lieu of a mailing list, I made a Twitter account @pickcode_io https://twitter.com/pickcode_io that you can follow for updates on the project

I definitely want to add some shortcuts like that

I thought I had a pretty good knowledge of the literature but June 2022 is pretty recent :-) CodeStruct looks great!

On the roadmap!

Standing on the shoulders of giants!

Things are a work in progress so I appreciate the feedback! I do limit the use of hovering in the UI because Pickcode is also meant for use on tablets, but adding it as a nice to have for desktop users makes sense

In the animation the pen is a rasterized circle of radius 12, but for calculations assuming it’s a square makes sense. FWIW I have no idea what the answer is to the question! I imagine making as many simplifying assumptions as possible and generalizing from there will help

Hope the video is fun, and here’s a math puzzle I thought of while creating it.

The algorithm:

Pen width = 12px Canvas x bounds = [-900px, 900px] Canvas y bounds = [-600px, 600px]

At each timestep: - The pen starts at the origin - A direction is chosen [N,S,E,W] with each direction receiving 25% probability. - The pen moves forward in that direction with a distance chosen uniformly from the integer range [50,75] - After moving, if the pen is out of bounds of the canvas in the x direction, set its x coordinate to 0 leaving the y coordinate unchanged - After moving, if the pen is out of bounds of the canvas in the y direction, set its y coordinate to 0 leaving the x coordinate unchanged

What is the probability that at timestep t, a pixel (x, y) is colored?

I’m working on an educational programming language (pickcode.io) and having something like this to pay off whatever AWS/Netlify stuff isn’t in the free tier would be great.

My observation is that basic syntax errors (indentation, missing colons, etc) take up a ton of time for students and that this takes away from the real learning goals. I agree that there have been a ton of attempts to solve this problem so the onus is on me to demonstrate that there are better outcomes starting with Pickcode vs Python.

Pickcode roughly falls under the category of "frame based editor" and there has been some research that suggests it's a potentially useful approach.

Time will tell if it works! I think there's still quite a bit of work on the app before I can start conducting that research in a formal way.

Context here: Pickcode is meant for high school students and is meant to serve as an intermediate step between block code (i.e. Scratch, App Inventor) and coding in Python/Javascript. As a high school teacher, I've noticed that block code is a bit too easy for students, but jumping right to Python is a bit rough and a lot of student time is wasted on syntax vs. building conceptual understanding. Simple command line programs you can build with basic Python skills aren't super engaging, and teaching how to use libraries like Pygame or making full web apps with HTML/CSS/JS is hard given the time constraints of a first semester course on programming.

Also, is there a way to make more than one project/rename projects? Another UI thing, I think having those side panels expand on hover is a little distracting, maybe use a chevron to expand/collapse? If you have contact info on the page I'd be happy to give some more feedback, don't want to spam HN

This is a pretty slick app! One thing I notice is that there are a lot of options in things like the insert menu with tags that aren't super popular. Maybe prioritizing more commonly used options would help with the UX? Also once you're logged in, there's no way to get back to the landing page without logging out.