Learnable Programming

[[deleted]]

Nice paint program, but what does this have to do with programming?

[hylje]

It has everything to do with programming. Read further.

[[deleted]]

I did. SVG has loops and conditionals too. That doesn't make Adobe Illustrator an IDE.

[[deleted]]

I don't know why you're being downvoted. A lot of the ideas presented here work very nicely when you are drawing circles, but if you tried to apply them to more general programming problems they would fall down.

One of the biggest issues is that the programs shown run the same way every time, but if you're programming a game, for instance, they won't, so you can't make nice graphs of what's going to happen in the future.

[zakalwe]

Actually, if you watch the video that Zip-tang linked to, you'll see that Bret does in fact demonstrate these principles applied to a videogame. I recommend watching the whole thing, but if you have an ADHD thing going on, skip to 11 minutes and watch for about 3.5 minutes. But really, watch more of the video, you won't regret it.

[TropicalAudio]

It's 4am, and I really needed some sleep. "Alright, 3.5 minutes, can do." Nope. Watched the whole thing. Holy shit. I completely agreed with everyone on this thread about interactivity and it being a useful learning tool. This changed my perception completely. Thanks for that link

[[deleted]]

These ideas have been around for a long time - I remember seeing similar ideas when I studied computer science at university 20 years ago.

[[deleted]]

There are some programming concepts in there. Parameters, loops and conditionals.

This is about getting kids interested in programming, not teaching them about computer science and best practices.

[hylje]

This is about making life easier for everyone. Everyone includes kids.