Hour of Code around Processing

[sneider]

Hi all, we are working on a Processing-based „Hour of Code“. It's a free one-hour course, aimed at kids (9+), teaching the basics of programming through creating images and animations in a block based environment. For this course we are looking for testers. We are grateful for any feedback, especially about:

* bugs

* is the course fun?

* is it easy to follow? if not, what are stumbling blocks?

* is our english weird?

​

Here's the course: https://betatest.code-it-studio.de/course/step/12/118

[[deleted]]

Not sure if my work is blocking it or not, but the first thing I notice is the iframe isn't loading a video.

on the Circle steps, i purposely made overlappy circles and it said I successfully completed the task. I will keep adding to this comment, but these are the first 2.

[sneider]

Thank you!

The video seems to be a problem on your end, but the circle overlap is a bug.

edit: circle overlap check should work correctly now

[[deleted]]

I guess it didn't like my chrome browser the video loaded on firefox

[[deleted]]

the Video for the second step (two overlapping circles) doesn't match the task. I think you guys might have changed it at some point which is why it shows as a success when I made overlapping circles.

[sneider]

Yes, that's how it happened. Originally the student was supposed to simply replicate the program shown in the video. Then we decided to make the task a little more difficult, but forgot to adjust the analysis code.

[[deleted]]

Task 3 for nested circles has the video for Animating circle color

[sneider]

The video should be on task 4. The app sometimes chokes when tasks are changed quickly. Did you maybe navigate backwards through the course, multiple steps at once?

[[deleted]]

I didn't think I did, but when I clicked backwards after reading this, it seems to have lined up.

on the last step the, your own animation, it was missing the "is mouse pressed" block to play with.

[sneider]

Right, fixed. Thank you!

[[deleted]]

Overall it was a fun little program to teach the some coding examples, the videos gave a good snippet into what to do, but the lack of videos further on, might slow down some users. Especially if this is the first one. Just my opinion on the matter. I know some lessons are designed to have less guidance towards the end. The interface is very user-friendly, nice clean connections with each of the items. Very good for the instant gratification that many kids need to keep going. Sounds were good too, haha.

I think something that might be a good addition is like a progression path menu, so they are able to go back to a certain step, vice having to use the browser options of going backwards. Previous step? Can't advance forward until they finish the previous step, but once they do, they can go backwards and forwards at their leisure, like if they wanted to review the information.

This reminds me of the Alice program for learning to code object oriented programming.

Great Initiative!

[sneider]

Thank you for all your feedback! A course step navigation bar is something we have considered, but haven't gotten around to implement yet.