+1 My kids and I had a lot of fun with Pico-8, building simple games and learning basic geometry.
The community (inherited from Pico-8) is already implementing cat/wget/grep[1] and, of course, Minesweeper[2] in Picotron! Whatever Joseph White/zep is building brings back the early days of Internet and IRC where the everybody builds and shares unashamedly while having a ton of fun!
Thank you zep for making computing fun again for more mere mortals!
I'm curious how old your kids were when they started hacking on PICO-8 code?
My son (7yo) likes block-based programming (using Scratch, Scratch Jr and Octostudio) and Minecraft, but I'm wondering what a smooth on-ramp might be for PICO-8 or similar.
I got my first computer when I was about 10yo, so I was content to read through the books that came with it to learn the basics of BASIC and a little 6502 assembly. But I don't think that will work due to age, availability of other devices etc.
My kids are 12 and 14 and I can't get them interested in coding beyond what they might do at school. They showed an interest in Scratch, but I believe I introduced it WAY too early. Moreover, it moved them too quickly past the creative aspects and into writing code. Also, years later, I showed them PICO-8 and they weren't terribly interested.
In hindsight, I would recommend working with them at a young age (<10) to design game art and ideas. Then, the parent implements it and ports it to a portable platform. The child sees the creative aspects and the final output, but is shielded from the coding side in the early days. I imagine a child playing a game they designed on paper with crayons would be really satisfying. It would almost be like magic!
Then, let the transition to the coding side happen more organically or through a school program or some such. Maybe when they finally ask, "So, parent, how do I actually code these games?"
That's what I've been doing with one of my kids. They're designing the sprites and maps in the PICO-8 sprite editor and I'm taking the lead on showing them how to do the rest.
They've also enjoyed tweaking the sprites of existing PICO-8 games.
StoryChopsticks entered into a copyright agreement with six young authors aged between 7-11 years.
As a part of their Chinese language learning process, these young students are guided by their facilitators to create their own Chinese storybook, experiencing the highs and lows of the creative publishing process.
This contract signifies an important step towards owning intellectual property, building a pipeline for income generation, and above all, learning to make a mark in the world.
To show your support for these young and passionate authors, please join us for the launch of their book on March 25th (Saturday) at 11am GMT+8.
Reminds me of this absolutely fascinating video of restoration of antiques (few centuries old) into "like new" condition for museums: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIoi-DSm0e4
We do exactly this at the startup [1] that I'm running. Depending on their level and the equipment they have, young children learn Chinese online with native teachers using Zoom on their phones or StoryLand (eg Gather) on their laptops.
Many commenters have mentioned that socialisation and its associated obligations are beneficial to learning, and this is what we are reminded of everyday among our students.
Kids learn best when they see other kids learn. And kids learn best when they are able to directly apply what they learn into a project that they own. We enable our own students to publish their own books and to perform in musicals that they produce.
Many online education companies fail because they think that all online education ("edTech") is simply digitising the school. It's not. To succeed, we need to think deeply about what online and physical education does best.
+1 Been with Migadu since 2017 with no complaints. Lost some mails on an account due to a migration of sorts on their end though that was eventually restored after a ticket.
Over the past year we built StoryChopsticks - an online Chinese learning service to inspire children living in non-Chinese majority environments.
As a Chinese parent (by race, not nationality) with young children living in a heavily Westernised Chinese-majority country, Singapore, we learnt first-hand how important it is to have highly engaging content, creativity-based pedagogy, and teachers who build upon our learners' imagination.
Our own children have very low interest in all Chinese (non-English) content. Most Chinese language content are of low quality, tell traditional stories in a staid manner, and built upon the foundations of rote memorization.
To convince our own kids to learn Chinese, we make up our own stories and materials and, through play and acting, convince them to gain interest to learn the language. We refined our approach by experimenting at preschools, public libraries, and in-person classes.
We now deliver our pedagogy online to more than a hundred students every month using our own original stories together with physical books and flashcards built-in grammar to their doorsteps. Our young learners love our service and we have > 90% retention rate consistently.
Technology-wise, we glued together a marketing and course delivery system with Wordpress, Moodle, Zoom, Gather.town, Zapier, and a lot of hard work with a team spreaded across Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Egypt, and Indonesia.
As a second time startup founder (the first back in 2008 with a NLP startup [1]), it feels surreal to be able to focus on the problem and the customer together with domain experts (ex-preschool teacher with 20+ years of experience as cofounder), with so much of the tech stack already taken care of by somebody else (eg DigitalOcean, Closte, Stripe etc) and achieve five digit MRR within a year.
We are currently trying to solve a few challenges:
* How do we get children to learn in a highly-motivated self-directed manner? If you have seen how young children pickup and learn Roblox, you will be amazed by how second-nature it is to kids.
* How do we deliver online learning off-screen?
Thank you for checking us out. Any feedback, critique, or ideas for (online) early childhood education will be super for helping deliver better online lessons (on/off screen).
[1]: https://imgur.com/YMMaM6E [2]: https://apnews.com/article/australia-singapore-solar-sun-cab...