Hi Zach, I just stumbled upon your blog post about this at https://sekao.net/blog/nightcoders.html, by the way of Shaun LeBron retweeting Josh Burkes tweet which cited "We should try to be the next Geocities, not the next Intellij".
Last night, I spent some time coding with my son over on http://code.org. We started out with some flappy-bird thing, and ended up on https://codecombat.com/play?hour_of_code=true which is some kind of strange mix between coding and playing a game. Since I don't play games, but program, and my son doesn't program but plays games, this thing hit the sweet-spot for us, and I guess it's an example of an idea I've had for quite some time, make a game where the main interaction with the game is through coding. I'm not sure where I'm going with all this rambling, but here is a couple of points: 1) The flappy bird thing https://studio.code.org/flappy/1 essentially provides you with hooks into an event loop with predefined functions to call so kids can play around with stuff and see results easily. 2) The drawback with this approach (the graphic coding approach) is highlighted in Tommy Halls euroclojure talk from 2013 https://vimeo.com/100425264, which basically states that these approaches are not turtles all the way down and that that is a bad thing. 3) Knowing that you create games ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GzzFeS5cMc), I'd love to see some kind of more fleshed out game example in Nightcoders to start, well, playing with. 4) For kids (at least my 9yo), it seems like giving them an IDE and say here, code some stuff, doesn't work. But give a kid something like http://dragonbox.com/products/algebra-5, and they cannot stop solving equations. I'm not quite sure why I'm writing this, other than to say Nightcoders seems like a step in the right direction, and that I agree with the quote from the blog, and here are the thoughts it provoked. Erik. On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 5:20 PM, Zach Oakes <zsoa...@gmail.com> wrote: > Cloud IDEs are becoming more common. To quote the rifleman's creed, there > are many others like it, but this one is mine: > > http://nightcoders.net/ > > It's basically a hosted version of Nightlight, running the compiler on my > server so you can build CLJS projects using nothing but a web browser. I'm > aiming at beginners, much like I did with the original Nightcode, but this > time I'm going further by eliminating all setup requirements. > > Please be gentle with it. I've only been working on this for the past few > weeks while vacationing in mexico...mostly as a distraction while my body > convulsed over the somewhat unhygienic street food I gave it. I spent a lot > of time in the bathroom. That may be oversharing. Oh well. > > Enjoy! > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with > your first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Clojure" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
