Hopscotch: the basics of programming for kids on the iPad
How to interest women programming? Probably, offering them affordable learning tools at a very early age - apparently such an idea was in the minds of the creators of the Hopscotch application for iPad, a new visual environment for creating simple applications.
Hopscotch is an object-oriented language that is made intentionally bright and colorful, suitable for children of 8-12 years old. Instead of loading children with endless lines of code, creating Hopscotch programs is dragging and dropping various objects and scripts that can work with them. Objects are cute characters, and scripts can be selected from the drop-down menu or from the left menu. The result of the work of children can be short animations and games.
')
I must say that Hopscotch is in a pretty good company: Codea has released an iPad development environment that allows you to create applications using Lua (however, it is not aimed at children), and there is also Tynker on the market, another visual language like Hopscotch he also relies on friendly objects that can be stacked like Lego.
At the heart of Hopscotch (as well as Tynker) is Scratch , a visual programming language developed at MIT. Scratch is already a few years old, however, it does not work on mobile devices. But co-founder and head of Hopscotch, Jocelyn Leavitt, says that "he is very popular and we like it."
Levitt is a former history teacher interested in experimental teaching methods. She herself is not kodit, and together with another founder, Samantha, John remarks that "I would like Hopscotch to exist at the time when we were growing up."
Both founders want young people — especially girls — to start learning from these tools as early as possible. They are suitable for boys, but more important for girls. Boys can get excited about programming as they play video games that girls are less passionate about. "Girls love to create things." So the authors of the application have put a lot of effort into creating characters that are cute, funny and bright: "This is something that girls will like, and they are not too girlish."
Hopscotch works on iPad and is free. So far, the authors have not identified the monetization model, but they are still inclined to purchase within the application, for example, premium drawings, virtual goods or additional tutorials.
Hopscotch is an object-oriented language that is made intentionally bright and colorful, suitable for children of 8-12 years old. Instead of loading children with endless lines of code, creating Hopscotch programs is dragging and dropping various objects and scripts that can work with them. Objects are cute characters, and scripts can be selected from the drop-down menu or from the left menu. The result of the work of children can be short animations and games.
')
I must say that Hopscotch is in a pretty good company: Codea has released an iPad development environment that allows you to create applications using Lua (however, it is not aimed at children), and there is also Tynker on the market, another visual language like Hopscotch he also relies on friendly objects that can be stacked like Lego.
At the heart of Hopscotch (as well as Tynker) is Scratch , a visual programming language developed at MIT. Scratch is already a few years old, however, it does not work on mobile devices. But co-founder and head of Hopscotch, Jocelyn Leavitt, says that "he is very popular and we like it."
Levitt is a former history teacher interested in experimental teaching methods. She herself is not kodit, and together with another founder, Samantha, John remarks that "I would like Hopscotch to exist at the time when we were growing up."
Both founders want young people — especially girls — to start learning from these tools as early as possible. They are suitable for boys, but more important for girls. Boys can get excited about programming as they play video games that girls are less passionate about. "Girls love to create things." So the authors of the application have put a lot of effort into creating characters that are cute, funny and bright: "This is something that girls will like, and they are not too girlish."
Hopscotch works on iPad and is free. So far, the authors have not identified the monetization model, but they are still inclined to purchase within the application, for example, premium drawings, virtual goods or additional tutorials.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/176965/
All Articles