Birbla

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  • It has a nice interface and I really like it. I'll stay in tuned for the C++ version as well.
    by aarontian0
  • You may want to review it a bit more before soliciting feedback. For example, the very first task it asks the user to do is already done.
    by fwip
  • I tried out the first lesson for a few minutes. I thought it was pretty cool how the code immediately turned into something visual, especially with the drawing. I got a little confused when the lesson got to loops, so some more explanation there would have been helpful.
    by mohd_rafay
  • My only feedback is $49 for AI slop feels like extortion at best, and delusion at worst. Don't give up building stuff, we should all be using AI to build ideas because the cost of developing them has dropped substantially. We should not be using them, however, to grift one another.
    by gnarlouse
  • I tried to create a comprehensive environment to meet the needs of students and beginners who want to get into programming. Version 1.0 was released just a week ago, and I'm currently finalizing version 1.1, which should go live very soon.

    You can download it for free here: https://simpl-pseudocode.itch.io/simpl

    by SIMPL_Language
  • I'm working on something similar: https://akicode.com

    Python and C++ both run in the browser, with a single-step debugger. Python has turtle and matplotlib (both interactive, not static images), and C++ has full STL. There's also a Linux terminal with redis-server/redis-cli built in, all running locally in your tab, not on a remote VM.

    It's free and needs no sign-up, so give it a try.

    by lqs_
  • CMU Academy https://academy.cs.cmu.edu/splash Does a great job implementing this idea and making it available at no cost.
    by ezra60
  • Most of teaching kids to code is them understanding terminology, structure, and getting them unstuck. This has bits of information mixed with unscaffolded terminology all over the place, some hidden in collapsibles, and some just missing.

    For example the `range` example in the second activity doesn't show a `for` loop's structure, how `range` is called, or what it does. One of the hints shows you the syntax for a `range` call, but nothing about loop syntax.

    The hints are on request rather than at-need, and aren't linked to what's going wrong for them - doing some structural analysis of the code to decide what hint might be needed would make hints more useful. The couple of activities I looked at didn't have particularly useful hints that targeted real problems and were more of the "here's a snippet of completed code" variety, which doesn't teach anyone anything.

    I'd recommend going and looking into some teaching pedagogy before building stuff, tbh.

    The actual activity objectives don't look too bad, but the UI is a mess of the wrong sorts of information to help kids learn the principles.

    I was curious about the tutor, but not curious enough to hand over an auth token to it. I've been building a writing tutor using local models for my kids, and it's been an interesting experience trying to provide helpful, structured information at the time they need it, rather than just asking for answers, or parsing generic advice.

    by zarify

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