Hi, Bernhard!
The lack of reading and writing skills was the issue I faced. You nailed
it. I was also teaching lower income families so starting with a
written language could start earlier depending on the student or groups
writing level.
Yes, I did try codecombat and it was good. When I tried this a few
years back the site was newer than it is now and there was not a lot of
content to keep the kids intrigued. At the time it was a good activity
for a few days. The page is free software, but "Note: the levels on
codecombat.com are not open source." It would be amazing if there was a
community effort to make libre levels. If it exists, I am unaware.
From the board game page you listed, I have Code Master and Robot
Turtles which are similar. I found that the board games like that are
not very exciting to young kids, but could be useful for an introduction
to robotics concepts. A successful game we would use to introduce
robotics was using the instructors as robots and the room as a game
board. The children would write instructions and the instructors would
interpret the instructions very literally. This can add comedy which
balances out the frustration. Interpreting a one line program written as
"Walk across the room" might result in walking in a straight line
through the room and falling over the couch for example. Ambiguous
instructs like "Turn right" could be interpreted as a 360 degree turn in
place. "Walk forward three steps" would be interpreted correctly. The
low tech nature of the game also helps reduce the economic barrier to entry.
The partner program that we used for robotics chose the Lego mindstorms
platform which is proprietary, but also drag and drop like blockly and
friends. A blockly based Arduino robot would be a great free software
addition to the education space. If it exists, I am unaware.
Best,
Michael McMahon | Web Developer, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: 4337 2794 C8AD D5CA 8FCF FA6C D037 59DA B600 E3C0
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org
On 10/28/21 7:59 AM, Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
Michael,
thanks for sharing your experiences.
Am Dienstag 26 Oktober 2021 18:38:20 schrieb Michael McMahon:
Around the age of 10, I would switch them away from drag and drop
languages to Python or Lua if they were inclined through modifying
simple games and modifying Minetest mods.
Reading and writing is an important precondition of course.
So is logical thinking and having fun with puzzles.
Do you have experience with
https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat
and the service based on it?
What I found good is that they were available in German.
So the local language matters a lot, because most children cannot do enough
English at 10 years.
Anyone experiences or even research about board games that should prepare for
coding, like
https://www.thinkfun.com/type/coding-games/
Best Regards,
Bernhard
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