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
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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