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The previously mentioned Turing Tumble educational game has achieved its funding goal. It will now be possible to produce molds and distribute the game to its thousands of crowdfunders and beyond. The game has similarities to Castle Turing in Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age and a manual which has a passing similarity to educational electronics kits but with the unnecessary storyline of a space escape with manga styling.
The Turing Tumble has this description on the project's Kickstarter page:
Turing Tumble is a new type of game where players (ages 8+) build mechanical computers powered by marbles to solve logic puzzles. It's fun, addicting, easy-to-learn, and while you're playing, you discover how computers work.
I'm all about teaching kids to code. When I was a professor at the University of Minnesota, I saw how valuable it is for all students to be coders. I have three young kids and I've tried all sorts of games to build their interest in coding. The problem is that they all treat computers like abstract, black boxes. They overlook the fundamental, most amazing concept: how simple switches, connected together in clever ways, can do incredibly smart things.
Kids learn best when they use their senses to explore concepts. Turing Tumble is the only game that lets kids see and feel how computers work. The logic isn’t hidden inside a computer chip – it’s all right there in front of them. It builds logic and critical thinking skills, fundamental coding concepts, and grounds their understanding of computers.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday June 12 2017, @10:42PM (3 children)
this is a great idea.
CS10 at Caltech was a wonderful class, and one of the few whose lessons have stuck with me since graduating. Carver Meade, the instructor, started by explaining how charge carriers move around in doped silicon crystals. Then he explained transistors, then logic gates and so on.
By the end of the class each student had written quite a featureful color vector graphics editor in PASCAL on an HP 68000 workstation.
Some of the CS graduates I've mentioned this to ridiculed the course for starting with the basics like this. But I've found that the same people really don't understand how computers work.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday June 12 2017, @11:49PM (2 children)
Well, on the other hand,
Teach computer architecture with assembly and machine language lessons to young kids, go ahead, even the easy MIPS stuff. Watch them grow to quickly hate computing (and you along with it) forever and go on to study liberal arts and Black studies in college. If they're going to start crying trying to find their curly-brace problems, what makes one believe they'd be interested in visualizing even a simple processor at the transistor or block-diagram level?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 13 2017, @12:31AM (1 child)
We have observational evidence that exposing children to Z80, 6809, and 6502 assembly is safe, that stuff is like mothers milk for little proto-hackers, but the jury is out on MIPS. Historically DEC people especially PDP-8 and PDP-11 turned out pretty well. 8051 people, 360 IBM BAL, 8086 people, well...
When I was a kid we ran a Z80 in the classroom with desks for registers and a sheet of paper to hold the data. It was orderly and worked and you learned a lot viewing it. A modern CPU, yeah that might look like drunken square dancers on acid and the kids aren't going to do much more than WTF the whole thing.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday June 13 2017, @12:42PM
The proto-hackers quickly gets exposed to BASIC that is easily accessible, but soon realize it's also slow.. So they start figuring out a way to get things faster. And stumble on assembler leaving the rest of the pack in the dust ;)
And once there's control using assembler. That networking starts to itch ;)