#Lightbot code hour loop 6 how to#

It looks like this may be targeted towards very young children, but in that case my worry is not that this won't snag their attention (very young children are much more interested in a computer game than my quadcopter) but rather that they'll simply forget about it by the time they learn to read and write (and thus even be able to start reading and writing code.) But having a virtual character follow commands in an interface which looks like it came out of a preschool? I doubt it. Seeing the robot move across the board, shoot projectiles or battle another robot (at their command!) fascinates them. Seeing my quadcopter soar through the sky at over a hundred miles an hour fascinates them. I don't see any moment here that would make the kids excited. My point is: there has to be some kind of moment where you snag the kids' attention.

#Lightbot code hour loop 6 how to#

This is because they have no idea of how to build a quadcopter that can go as fast as mine (which is reasonable, considering it took eight months to build mine - it's among the fastest in the world and may even be the fastest) but they do know how to drag and drop blocks to make the robot go. My quadcopter usually catches their attention (wow, a machine that can go over a hundred miles an hour! cool!) but the Lego Mindstorms robot is what keeps them interested. I can sit them in front of Scratch for four hours twice a week, or this, or LOGO, or any of a multitude of other solutions, but the two things that never fail to interest them are Lego Mindstorms and my quadcopter. The thing that gets their interest every time is something physical. I love to help the kids learn and I even try to teach them (to some extent) how to code. I'm a mentor for a Lego robotics team and have been for years - this year's season will mark my eighth year of Lego Robotics. Glad to see it being updated and promoted!

Procedures often required some extra conceptual explanation, but also get a good treatment. Regardless, I think light-bot is fun, challenging, feels good to beat, and helps to familiarize kids with step-by-step operations and looping structures especially.

That paralysis was very common for us, and it sometimes took a lot of encouragement to get kids to just play around and try whatever came to mind. I haven't tested this version (I no longer teach those classes), but I can imagine kids clicking arbitrarily around until things move forward without them quite understanding why or whether they were successful, or just being paralysed by not being sure what to do. What do > and > mean to an 11-year-old, or < vs a wraparound back arrow? There are a few other issues that seem to have popped up: there are so many buttons on the relatively small screen that at any point, it can be difficult to tell what to push next. Great work on that! Starting with just enough instructions and slots to demonstrate the direction of flow is also a good move. I'm very glad to see that that's one of the biggest improvements in this version of light-bot: instructions highlight when you mouse over them, clicking them removes them/adds them immediately, the position they will end up in when you release a drag is highlighted, etc. The awkward click-targets and instruction management were very difficult for the kids, who wanted to experiment and change the order of their bot programs frequently. About two years ago, I was responsible for the curriculum of a number of after-school 'learn programming' classes for kids aged 11-14 (Canadian grades 6-8), and we used a slightly older version of light-bot as one of our teaching tools, among others.Īfter using light-bot as a central piece of the first classes we ran, I decided to make less use of it, because it had significant usability issues for the kids.