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posted by martyb on Monday June 12 2017, @10:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the gravity-not-included dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @11:00PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @11:00PM (#524705)

    Yeah. I can see how at an abstract level it's Turing-complete, but I don't think that will be readily apparent to the novice. However, I can say from personal experience from my ultimately vain attempts to prove that I'm not a misogynerd by mentoring cisfemales in programming concepts that a literally hands-on approach is definitely beneficial to the novice.

    I had a set of brackets (these: []) I had drawn on to paper squares. We would practice basic array operations such as push, pop, shift, and unshift. Then we were able to look at basic algorithms that operate on arrays (sorting algorithms were outside of our limited scope, which was purely practical--as a practical matter all modern software libraries provide sorting algorithms that may as well be black boxes), physically moving around paper squares into and out of the brackets.

    (For sorting algorithms, there's various ethnic dances on Youtube that demonstrate different algorithms such as Quick-sort with Hungarian (Küküllőmenti legényes) folk dance [youtube.com]. I recommended those as "extra credit." Definitely less dry than a purely theoretical approach.)

    I think that was helpful... it seemed to be... but maybe that person simply had "the knack." I did not get accused of mansplaining. The last person I mentored turned out not to be cisgendered... and feminism has so far withheld personal retaliation for my ultimate failure in that instance.... I will never again take the risk of mentoring... I'm done with it... it's fruitless... a vain attempt to disprove an insubstantial accusation motivated purely by sexism and transphobia.

    ...I don't think I need to log in... it should be obvious who this is. I need to get over it already. The misogynerd narrative cannot be appeased. Feminists are all sexist, transphobic assholes (including being in the privileged position of power necessary to constitute bigotry... or whatever the current "fine when I do it but wrong when you do it" formulation of bigotry is), and I think it's more likely that any here who are not transphobic assholes are mistaken about being feminists. I may get a great number of things wrong in my comments, but I do not think that is one of them after a lifetime so far of bitter experiences of being on the receiving end of sexism and sexual harassment.

    tl;dr Hands-on is definitely good, but this will not appease the misogynerd narrative, because it is motivated by things that cannot be appeased such as transphobia and sexism.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @06:21AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @06:21AM (#524808)

    I will never again take the risk of mentoring... I'm done with it... it's fruitless... a vain attempt to disprove an insubstantial accusation motivated purely by sexism and transphobia.

    I am almost afraid to ask: what mentoring are you talking about?

    The Computer Science mentoring or the transition mentoring?

    (Also not logging in because -- trying to avoid distractions for a while)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @01:06PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @01:06PM (#524890)

      Computer science, but that's somewhat of a misnomer, since computer science is a branch of mathematics. Though we did discuss big O and other concepts from computer science.