
Show HN: Functional Programming for Kids: Interactive Tutorial - viebel
https://github.com/viebel/kids.klipse.tech
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magic_beans
Whoa... this is all over the place. The imagery suggests this is a tutorial
for 6-8 year olds, but the language would be incomprehensible to any child
under the age of 16.

The design is also pretty cluttered -- no child under the age of 16 is going
to have the patience to get through those huge walls of text.

This should really be called 'Functional Programming for Teenagers, Maybe, or
College Kids Who Don't Know How to Program'.

Do any of the developers have ANY experience in childhood education at all???

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viebel
For kids alone, it is indeed difficult. But if the parent knows a bit about
Lisp and goes over the tutorial with them, the kids can learn and even enjoy!

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gravypod
Sadly this set of tutorials seem to follow the disturbing trend that "Computer
Programming is Math." I think this is wrong.

Computer Programming is field of turning informal and vague declarations of a
process into an infinity accurate declaration of a process. It is also the
field of doing that in a simple and maintainable way.

It is as much related to spelling and literature as it is mathematics. What I
think it more closely relates to is philosophy and logical analysis. I think
it is also a disservice to people to wrongly inform them of what will be
expected of them by saying "this field is math."

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superdupermanhe
hear hear

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thecolorblue
There is some good content for how kids can learn to program but not why kids
should learn. I would focus on building equations kids would relate to, like
"graphing the change in temperature in the town from Frozen" or "how much
walking it takes to evolve a pokemon".

These examples probably show how little I know about children. You can
probably think of some better ones.

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ivan_ah
A related project teaching basics using scheme is this one:
[http://www.bootstrapworld.org/materials/spring2016/courses/b...](http://www.bootstrapworld.org/materials/spring2016/courses/bs1/index.shtml)
paired with the online IDE:
[http://www.wescheme.org/openEditor](http://www.wescheme.org/openEditor)

it's nice because it starts off with a game, and walks the students through
making it themselves.

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viebel
It's still work in progress. Only a few articles for the moment. I would be
happy to hear your thoughts about the best way to teach functional programming
to kids.

~~~
startupdiscuss
Have you used this on actual kids? I feel you would learn very quickly from
them.

As an adult, I can only speak for myself, and although this is nice, I think
it is comparable to the functional programming programs for adults out there
(for instance, Microsoft's online F# tutorial, or Coursera's Scala tutorial).
The pictures and things aren't making it easier for me. I don't know if it
will be different for kids.

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viebel
I have went over this tutorial with my kids (12 and 13 years old) and they
enjoyed it a lot.

~~~
startupdiscuss
That's great.

Did you try the regular "adult" tutorials with them? It would be interesting
to see if they liked this more, or found one of them interesting.

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superdupermanhe
functional programming is for laughs

