
Kids can now learn to code with Pocky, the delicious Japanese snack - legodt
http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/5/12387456/glicode-pocky-coding-game-japan
======
groceryheist
It's like mit scratch. Except the underlying purpose is to sell junk food, the
only sprite you can control is a corporate mascot, and you do so alone instead
of in a social platform.

The focus on problem solving may be good for helping kids learn and practice
solving problems procedurally. The free form nature of scratch gives a lot of
freedom for goofing off, which can be a good thing.

[http://scratch.mit.edu](http://scratch.mit.edu)

~~~
keerthiko
While you didn't say so explicitly, you sound disparaging of this initiative
in favour of Scratch being better in every way.

Scratch is great and noble and better in every way as an isolated programming
learning tool, but it's worth noting the reach and marketability of Pocky to
get kids interested in the whole scene.

You (parents, kids, non-CS-oriented teachers and mentors) aren't going to find
and use Scratch without the prime directive of "I want a kid-friendly
programming learning tool".

But now you can get the kids Pocky, which you may have gotten anyway since no
kid is going to complain about that, _and_ they can learn something meaningful
and cool with a character that has context they know and appreciate, unlike
scratch's characters that exist in their bubble. Actually being able to impact
a much larger audience even with a less ideal experience, is net worth much
more than a stellar tool that cannot break past a high activation barrier and
caters to a very tiny audience. Like Settlers of Catan for introducing people
to board games outside Monopoly, and IFLS (I Fucking Love Science) for getting
people interested in space, biology, etc. These seem like perverted
contractions of beautiful things, but at the end of the day they get more
people interested and that's a good thing.

I for one remember countless mornings reading and learning the backs of the
cereal boxes as I had breakfast getting ready for school, and those mornings
would have been so much more productive building Pocky programs, but there was
no way I was going to fire up Scratch and create programs there.

------
Animats
Pocky has been expanding into the US. It used to only be available in Nijiya
Markets, at a big markup over the price in Japan. Now it's in US movie
theaters.

Maybe we'll get Calorie Mate food blocks next. Programming with Calorie Mate
could become a thing.

The "lay out a pattern with physical objects, take a picture, analyze, and
build program" approach is interesting. Like most forms of visual programming,
it won't scale, but it's cute.

Now someone into Minecraft should build something where you build with Legos,
take a picture, and import into Minecraft.

~~~
hkmurakami
> It used to only be available in Nijiya Markets

I'm going to anal-retentively nitpick you and proclaim that Pocky was
available in places like Yaohan (now defunct) [1] before Nijiya [2] even
existed. ;)

[1] First US store in 1979
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaohan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaohan)

[2] First store in 1986 [http://www.nijiya.com/about-
us](http://www.nijiya.com/about-us)

~~~
twblalock
In California, it's been sold by the big grocery store chains for years.

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bemmu
I just went to the supermarket here in Japan to hunt down some of these Pocky.
At least the ones they had did not promote this, so they are using the candy
programming app as a promotion to get people to buy the candies, but the
candies in store are not promoting programming.

~~~
michaelbuddy
as popular Pocky is in Japan, Japan isn't going to go through inventory
everywhere as fast as a lot of countries eat sweet snacks. They actually eat
sensibly there. Expect the stock to replenish at slower pace.

~~~
marak830
Not sure why you are being down voted, I see a lot lower amount of people
eating food like that here compared to Australia.

I am going to look for one of these packs though :-)

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DonHopkins
The Japanese are raising a generation of kids who will dominate the
international code eating competitions.

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antirez
It looks like a bad idea to bind the concept of having fun programming with
eating sweets.

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Cyph0n
Pocky is available in most supermarkets in the UAE. It's an amazing snack food
to be frank. Great to see it on HN!

------
spike021
I just bought four special imported flavors the other day and I don't feel
guilty at all for it.

Pocky is great.

This sounds pretty cool though.

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nether
Kids should be outside playing and interacting with other kids, not coding and
gobbling candy.

~~~
jameslk
I was one of those kids who stayed glued to a computer indoors and had all my
friends online. Now I have a career and friends across the globe to thank for
it. Not every person should follow a prescribed path.

~~~
overcast
How often do you socially interact with those global friends, in person? I'm
all for learning awesome computer skills, but there is a time to be a child,
and a time to be an adult. I wouldn't exchange growing up in the woods with
BMX bikes, skateboards, and vine swings with the neighborhood kids. For
sitting behind a computer all summer vacation, messaging people on the
internet. I now have a career, and friends all over the world as well.

~~~
jameslk
In person? That's difficult for me since I'm not often able to travel to
Finland, the UK, Egypt, etc. I interact with my online friends nearly daily,
online. My point was that I would of never have met such diverse people early
on had I not grown up around a computer + Internet. Nor would I have
necessarily been able to get a job programming right out of high school that
helped pay for my college education. I'm not claiming my path was superior in
any way, only that there's more than one way through life.

~~~
overcast
Of course you would have, just like the rest of us have friends all over the
world now. I respect your decisions, and I'm glad you're doing well however
I'm not going to agree spending your youth indoors was a good choice. There is
no argument for what this type of lifestyle is doing to this current
generation. They are basically incapable of socially interacting and dating.

~~~
jameslk
> There is no argument for what this type of lifestyle is doing to this
> current generation. They are basically incapable of socially interacting and
> dating.

I'm not downvoting you, but it seems this comes off as a sweeping
generalization without any support. If you could at least back up your point
with some basis for your statement (ie a reference to something), it would
probably help to clarify what you're talking about.

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danthejam
But then they'll eat the snacks and be unable to play. What if you use
similarly shaped objects like pens and erasers?

~~~
icebraining
They'll just have to buy more Pockys!

Reminds me of Calvin eating boxes and boxes of "Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs"
to get the flying beanie:
[https://chrisstich.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ca4.gif](https://chrisstich.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ca4.gif)

------
zump
Kids learning to code will save the world.

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raimondious
It looks like this translates Pocky in different positions to lines of code
and then executes that code. This is too many levels of abstraction even for
me to make sense of as a professional programmer... I like where their heart
is but I think this would be a terrible introduction to coding.

~~~
brink
Looks to me like an opportunity for a TV show spinoff - "Are you smarter than
a 5th grader eating snacks with a smartphone?"

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ChrisArchitect
damnit
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12234079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12234079)

------
richmarr
But does it compile to Javscript?

------
na85
I'm not sure that a brand of chocolate-covered carbohydrates sponsoring
sedentary behavior like coding is something that should be celebrated.

Hours spent coding should be followed or broken up by physical activity, not
sugary treats.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Well, you need to fuel your brain somehow. Salad ain't gonna cut it. ;).

> _Hours spent coding should be (...) broken up by physical activity_

Please don't. It's hard enough to find two or three hours of uninterrupted
time as an adult. Kids and teenagers can pull off impressive feats of quick
learning and skill acquisition in big part because they have long stretches of
uninterrupted time. Don't take away the opportunity they have.

~~~
josephmx
It's more important to be healthy than to be a great programmer, we should be
encouraging physical activity

~~~
TeMPOraL
For you, maybe. I understand that fitness is growing to become a new
mainstream religion in the West, but not everyone wants to participate in
this.

That said, I'm not saying one should not have a healthy lifestyle. Sure,
encourage more physical activity. But for the love of Great Maker, do not
_break up_ the time kids spend on intellectual tasks or hobbies into small
chunks. You can do fitness rituals in 15-minutes stretches, but you can't do
anything that requires any kind of creativity or focus in that time.

~~~
kiba
_You can do fitness rituals in 15-minutes stretches, but you can 't do
anything that requires any kind of creativity or focus in that time._

I do my programming in chunk of twenty minutes at a time.

Complete focus, no distraction.

~~~
icebraining
What do you do in between?

~~~
Jemmeh
I do the same thing, 30 minute stints, 3-5 minute breaks. Occasionally if I'm
really rolling I'll just keep going but I generally make sure to stop for
breaks. The key is to do things that won't get you mentally distracted, has a
good stopping point, and lets you mentally rest.

Good breaks:

\- I walk around the building

\- Watch a short comedy youtube video

\- Scroll through memes/comics

\- Read blog posts, usually ones that aren't too detail-oriented and with good
stopping points (Coding Horror is a good example)

\- Listen to an instrumental music song (no lyrics), close my eyes, maybe get
some fresh air.

Bad breaks:

\- Start a long email

\- Other projects.

\- Anything mentally taxing or stressful (don't pay bills on break, don't try
to figure out what you'll have for dinner)

\- Read an exciting book that you don't want to put down

Doing this helps me stay focused all day. Over an 8 hour shift I take breaks
for approx 48-80 minutes (plus lunch), so at most a little over an hour is
wasted--versus burning out after just a few hours, writing bad code that I
then spend the next day cleaning up.

This further translates into me being able to work some more on some side
projects when I get home without getting burnt out--and not always
programming, but other mental work like writing, art, meal planning, etc.

------
michaelbuddy
Maybe Snapple or Dove Chocolates could add some programming related knowledge
under their labels / caps. That'd be kind of fun and apparently you get an
easy press release out of it.

~~~
NegativeLatency
From reading the article it sounds like Pocky did something much more
interesting than that. They are doing object recognition to use the candy as
symbols in a programming language. Sounds a bit different from what you
suggest.

~~~
DonHopkins
An edible programming language would be a great promotion for the
international roll-out of the new Unicode version of Post Alpha-Bits Cereal.

They could base it on PostScript, so it had nice graphics.

------
greggman
Just please don't call it paw-key. It's poe-key (rhymes with low-key) although
in truth there's a gap between poe & key

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gIrqQhwkM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gIrqQhwkM)

And yes I know someone is going to complain it's not English. So what. Neither
is the pronounciation of pizza. If you can bother to say pee-tsa instead of
piz-ah you can bother to say poe-key instead of paw-key

~~~
mwfunk
Do you correctly pronounce "Nikon" as "Nee con", then explain to your English-
speaking friends that that's how it's pronounced in Japan even though Nikon
marketing doesn't even use that pronunciation in English-speaking countries?

Do you correctly pronounce "champagne" the French way around your English-
speaking friends, even though the French pronunciation sounds almost nothing
like "sham pain" so of course you have to explain yourself every single time
you say the word?

Does actual phlegm emerge from your throat whenever you correctly pronounce
the Greek letter chi at the end of TeX and LaTeX, or do you just say "lay
tech" or (god forbid) "lay techs"?

Most importantly, do you say "guh noo slash lin ucks" and go around correcting
everyone who doesn't? Because if you do any of these things, please, please,
please stop. Please. Please. Seriously, it is so not worth it.

~~~
greggman
I would love to say all of those words correctly if someone taught me the
correct way.

Example: Recently visited France. Learned "framboise" ends with 'z' where as
lots of English speaking people some how think the correct French
pronunciation is fram-buwa. It's not it's fram-buawz

[http://forvo.com/word/framboise/](http://forvo.com/word/framboise/)

If someone says Bay-Nay-Nay for Banana or Hey-Ker Neh-wass for Hacker News I'd
expect people would correct them. There's a reason we correct people's
pronunciations. If we didn't they'd eventually stop being able to communicate.
You might have been able to excuse it when it was harder to communicate world
wide. now you can talk to at least 1/2 the world from your pocket. No more
excuses.

