Blog Archives

Millions of students learn to program in Java while playing a game

Kids playing Hour of Code

“In one week last week, Code.org’s Hour of Code reached more than 15 million students in 170 countries. Every major tech company promoted it, celebrities talked about it, and even the US President helped get the word out in their kickoff video. And shooting past Code.org’s crazy target of ten million players, kids are still continuing to play this week, with 600 million lines of code written and one in five US schoolchildren participating (with six times as many girls playing last week than have ever taken a computer science class in the US). It spread to more students in seven days than the first seven months of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram combined.

As one of Code.org’s partners, we at CodeCombat were both excited and hilariously unprepared to help teach such a sizable swarm of students to defeat the 44 ogres in our beginner campaign. Read on for what we learned from the onslaught of child programmers, including how obsessed kids are with games, how American students are the best trolls and the worst programmers, just how badly a user experience test can go, and the unfortunate difference between reddit traffic and school traffic.”

To read the full article click here;

http://sett.com/codecombat/180000-child-programmers-versus-44-ogres

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Letter School helps learners write – and sells 100,000 copies on Ipad

gameplay1

“The educational game LetterSchool reached a milestone this week: just a few months after its release, more than 100,000 copies of the app have been sold. That’s a striking result for an app that teaches something generations of children have wrestled with: how to write letters and numbers. LetterSchool’s greatest achievement is that it creates a very stimulating learning environment, offering kids a truly compelling gaming experience. Boreaal Publishers believes the app is an important part of the solution for better handwriting education.” http://www.sfgate.com/business/prweb/article/Interest-in-Learning-to-Write-Surges-Thanks-to-3672937.php

I wonder how well this game helps children to use a stylus.  Then again, I wonder how important using a stylus will be in 10 years.  Besides signing our names, how often do most adults use handwriting? While designing the Ipad, Steve Jobs said,
“So let’s not use a stylus. We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with – born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal. It works like magic.