Eventually she jumps on my back and the game doesn't last much longer because dadbot gets tired.
I sometimes try with my children. Having one on my shoulder and pulling either the left or the right ear to tell me where to go. The way home from kindergarten can then take a while, depending on how attentive they are. Of course, parent stumbling into hedges makes for a good laugh, so that may also sometimes be intentional.
It has a pretty steep learning curve if you're not experienced with building a program step-by-step from another perspective and you're only able to run it. The mobile version is a lot more gentle and has more content, but I think less challenging and less fun.
The music is great, and sitting together at a computer is a better collaborating experience than the mobile app.
Unless you're on a roadtrip.
LINK HALLWAY GRAB BALL LINK BEDROOM DROP BALL
etc... Then he would tell me what to do. It was fun.
I find that "algorithmic thinking" is too artificial for young kids. They are very versatile in a richer set of methods, which often are mutually conflicting yet lead to desired result.
Once we played with a programmable mouse that needs to find cheese. Very predictably, the most used button was "do a trick", which makes mouse make funny noise without moving further... Sweet times for the kid, doomed moments for the teacher.
For example:
Parent: "We're not going to have ice cream today."
3yo: "If we don't have ice cream today, can we have ice cream tomorrow?"
Or, more commonly:
3yo: "What if we have ice cream today and no ice cream tomorrow?"
3yo: "What if we have ice cream today and ice cream tomorrow too?". Because small children know better than to constrain themselves to artificially restricted choices offered by parents.
Source: experience from navigating such negotiations for the past 1.5 year with my now almost-5 daughter.
Maybe missed something in skimming through the blog post but seems like primarily it's simulating doing up/down/left/right and navigating a character through a maze. For some reason this seems to be the most popular approach for apps that teach kids programming.
i.e. https://kodable.com, which one of my kids is into and https://codecombat.com, which has been around for a while now.
I think this paradigm (navigating a character using "move" function invocations) is good but kind of exhausts its usefulness after a while. I question whether my daughter learns coding this way or just is playing a turn based top down platformer. The most code like thing is when you use 'loops' to have characters repeat sequences of moves. I think when kids grok these things these apps become just types of glofiried education flavoured video games. There are a lot of things in kodable for instance that I feel are just basic web games with coding terms slapped on it.
https://scratch.mit.edu/ is more like 'programming' imo, even at the level of the objective -- having a blank canvas to create something. It seems a little advanced for my kids right now though.
In musicology, sure, these distinctions are useful there. But what I want to stress is that you are wrong in this context. Not technically correct: wrong. The only mistake was you choosing to reply the way you did. It is, to be fair... a common mistake. Around here at least.
Your approach leads to calling them all sticks.
My daughter wants me to teach him how to play go at some point, but he’s not quite ready for that. He hasn’t yet learned the concept of winning or losing at games, and we don’t see any need to force that on him early. In the meantime, playing with and talking about the stones seems to have boosted his understanding of numbers.
[0]https://twitter.com/CBancos/status/1581662053189574656
[1]https://bancosparenting.wordpress.com/2023/02/04/pickle-and-...
Another example in Dutch [1] (with activity sheet here [2])
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BcZBl-BKhQ
[2] https://www.leukekinderactiviteiten.nl/wp-content/uploads/20...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_an...
By about age 7 or 8 it stopped being fun, because the kids could pretty much lay out an entire one-shot sequence of cards that solved the maze. (We never really got into trying to code "functions," it never quite seemed to be intuitive in the context of the game.)
I did find an online version here, for anyone who wants to try it without cutting out a bunch of alligators: https://tibordp.github.io/gator-calculus/
I am also on the search for more puzzles/challenges to do with it.
There is a competitive mode for it, still available on the official site: http://www.robotturtles.com/galapagos/ I have thought of trying that some day. The original game has not been played much since my kids were younger, but they are also not yet all old enough to play RoboRally. On the other hand we also have Colt Express that I think is a very fun lighter almost-RoboRally kind of game (if you squint a bit), that might appeal more to kids too old to still want to play Robot Turtles.
Nice recipe for developing perfect pitch :-)
One of my observations is that humming a note within my valid vocal range has "feeling" differences even within the hard cutoffs (usually about 2 octaves for most people). But those cutoffs (and presumably the feelings) move between childhood and adulthood.
(As an adult, my perfect pitch is not completely stable - if I don't use/tune it regularly, it can drift up to 2 semitones, but no further regardless of how long between tunings. Unfortunately I never did tests as a child.)
- variables - conditions - loops - functions
If there was a way to teach those concepts screen-free, even to adults, I would really love to know it.
ThinkFun has a game CodeMaster that teaches loops and conditionals, but my kids found it way to tedious to play. It is better than nothing.
Maybe some HN'er has an idea how to create some game for all these concepts?
(And, if there is any other core concept I am missing, I would love to hear that too.)
When you get into parallel programming, I think you'll need more than just those 4. But I'm not sure what the reduction is. Something akin to forking and joining.
- naming variables.
https://upperstory.com/turingtumble/
My sons (7 and 9) love it, and both have some grasp of binary thanks to it.
Spintronics also helped give me a new perspective on electrical current, current division and capacitance. Seeing and feeling resistance in the chain, how little/no load results in high current (chain link throughput) was more valuable than the “water in a hosepipe” analogies I learnt in my University EE classes. Really looking forward to induction in the expansion set.
I was curious about the company, and discovered that the co-founders are a husband and wife couple who were in engineering and education respectively before starting the company. I’m glad to see they are able to operate profitably without listing on Amazon, and hope they continue to release more excellent educational engineering toys that I can explore with my kids.
We don't have a xylophone but I might just have to get one so we can try out this game - I love it!
1 cent: Every hit is an atomic action that is causing the robot to take a certain action. Furthermore, all points in that maze has a decision (from at most 4 different choices) to make. So, hitting on a note (making a choice) is like writing an if statement. Furthermore, you can ask them to come up with the color combinations to hit before hand and try to run it all at once. If it fails, you do it again.
2 cents: Since this is designed for 2-3 year olds, if statements make a good basis for starting programming or logic in general. As they grow older, we can introduce loops and functions.
Moving on to the next question about starting to associate colors with notes although avoidable by randomly assigning colors to the notes (glue and paper), is possible like you said. However, I would like to claim that it will only stick (no pun intended) if the same colors play the same notes for years, if not months. Which given how two year olds are, is highly unlikely. They are done with a toy in about a week or two, max a month, give or take.
I wouldn't be so sure. As I stated, I have an association between book<=>music which was made within the days it took to read said book
There's a market for a pre-built set like this, with preplanned mazes to produce popular children's songs.
