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Kids don't want to code. They want to solve problems us oldies can't perceive
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When the Raspberry Pi shipped to a planet excited geeks in the middle of 2012, it changed the way we taught IT. That had always been the intention of creator Eben Upton. Give the kids the goods and they'll do the rest.At first, it seemed as though the grownups were more excited than the kids, creating all sorts of wacky Pi-based projects. Fortunately, those grownups - eager for the respect of their peers - shared everything they learned, posting to blogs, StackOverflow, and thousands of other websites. Want to know how to blink an LED? Drive a motor? Read a sensor? Set up a web server? Within the first year, all of that was out there, all of it indexed, searchable, and useful to kids.
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these kids are using sensors on a Raspberry Pi to read the air quality of the room, alerting asthmatics to seek an environment less likely to give them breathing problems. Over there - because sometimes the referees miss goals - a netball-crazed 11 year-old girl used an ultrasonic sensor and Raspberry Pi to create an automatic scoring system.Consider three ten year-olds who fussed and fiddled with LittleBits - a mashup of Lego with the Internet of Things - until they found just the right combination of pieces to create a system that allows you to know whether that sushi tray gliding by on that continuous track has been sitting around a little too long to be safe to eat. (Their inspiration was a teacher who'd gotten sick from bad sushi.)
The examples of kids' projects in the article aren't particularly strong. Have Soylentils seen kids doing particularly cool things with RPi's or Arduinos?
(Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Sunday August 30 2015, @11:48PM
I taught myself to code at age 8. By 9 I made a brickout clone that was more popular in the computer lab than Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, or any of the other crap they made us play. This was possible because the hardware would boot to a "root" prompt and dare you to explore. Now Apple wants to charge you $100 for the ability to create code on "their" devices, QBASIC is gone from MS OSs. The browser is the new command prompt; Thus, JS is the new BASIC, but it sucks to be trapped in an abusive relationship with a flaky browser with all its unintuitive cruft writing code your friends might not be able run even with the same hardware and OS (now they need a compatible browser too).
Most kids don't really want to code -- this has always been true. Others may like creating via drawing, music, story telling (not necessarily writing), physical construction, sports, etc. (creating with sports? Yes, you can design your own sport). The trick is to use technology to enable them all to collaborate on projects together so the "artsy" kids don't feel left out, the "sporty" kid won't feel pent-up and bored, and the "techy" kids don't feel ostracized for liking tedious code and electronics. E.g., one of our most successful projects was a laser tag clone with bases having programmable targets. Each team had to have 4 active non-person targets. Some targets were wireless and hot-glued to RC cars, others targets were stationary "networked" devices (some networked via speaker wire ran to a parallel port). We soon had more than 8 targets per team and the "Sysop" of each team played a meta-game by switching active targets in the array according to current battle field advantage in the game (so even the asthmatic kid could play this sport). The artsy kids decorated the targets / vests with their team's style so you could tell them apart. The sporty kids field tested the equipment and battle field configuration -- we had to move some things around to make it more fair and fun.
The thing that draws kids in seems to be making something that other people will use. It doesn't matter if it's a GUI for your battle field, a sensor for laser pointer "guns", a paper mache pony helmet, or a "target captured" sound effect. My point is: It's the act of creation that should be promoted rather than the medium. Hackers aren't limited to hacking any one area of life. IMO, stop focusing on the "kids using hardware" angle and simply enrich creative spaces with tech as just another material or canvas to create with. The sooner there's nothing special about tech-embedded in kids' creative efforts the more advanced the future will be. Everyone writing any code today is making things the hardware MFG didn't imagine, So what? Sensationalism Fail.
What's cheaper than Raspberry Pi and easier to make LEDs blink and stepper motors work with? Beige Box PCs that have parallel ports. The bits map directly to the pins. No need for fancy (de)serialization chips/code, just plug the wires directly from the port into your bread board w/ LEDs and see them light up corresponding to the bits you're reading and writing via the computer code. Think about it: You need a "Shield" to (de)serialize things and give you a parallel interface. WTF? Just use hardware with a parallel port. Bonus, when the neighborhood kids fry one, I've got 50 more in the garage scavenged from dumpsters or donated as electronics recycling. If you think the little buggers have a grin when using an expensive desktop computer to program a proprietary embedded system over serial interface with copy and pasted code from the net, you should see their faces when they get to tear down their very own computer case, connect wires directly, and pull something off on the actual machine they're programming with -- esp. if that "something" makes the machine give up its magic blue smoke. We have a pile of slightly broken machines just to finish torturing to death. Kids wouldn't be able to explore as freely if we were risking the sacrifice of an R.P. each time they picked up a soldering iron.
If a single board computer's form factor is key, then a quick search will turn up better alternatives in price or in power than the Raspberry Pi.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Monday August 31 2015, @02:17AM
>>Yes, you can design your own sport
Calvinball !!!
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