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by emmiechang 3621 days ago
We play tested this with 10 year olds at the San Francisco Public Library recently and the kids LOVED it -- keep in mind, these were not middle or upper middle class privileged kids, but lower income at risk ones.

The challenge is that after about 45 min of "play" time, they want to 'build' something and create--and Playgrounds doesn't provide the environment to do that. Then, they get bored and feel encumbered.

After working with over 1000 kids in our beta phase, we've tested almost every product on the market.

I personally like Scratch + Learntomod.com which uses Minecraft to teach Javascript and CodeCombat.com (My YC batchmates).

We're soon launching an online course (for a nominal fee) that has progression, milestones, and support for parents who want their kids to 'complete' a project. Message me or check out our beta site if you're interested to in being a beta tester for our online product--would love to hear from you.

4 comments

I think you need to dig deeper into Swift Playgrounds. The iPad user can definitely start their own playground outside of the preprogrammed ones provided by Apple.

In addition, you as a developer can create additional playgrounds in Xcode and transfer them to Swift Playgrounds on the iPad. That means you can give the kids a basic template and allow them to fill in the code. For example, create a template with a couple of pages with the imports already complete and a basic template of empty procedures to get them started.

And from watching the WWDC session it seems the playgrounds can have access to the whole iOS SDK, including rather fun stuff like corebluetooth so there is a huge amount of potential in Playgrounds.
I just did an experiment of upload XCode playground to iPad via AirDrop. It worked.

https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/753801598367731712

However, with the .playgroundbook format (folder), it seems that I can only export it to Mac (as a folder) and can not AirDrop back to iPad. And it seems that XCode 8 beta-2 does not support playgroundbook yet.

I am keeping an eye on Apple documentation:

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/docum...

I was going to message you but do not see any contact details in your profile.

Pasting your website, lead me to your contact link of team@futureleague.co ... is that best place for us to message you?

Do you have a link to Scratch? I'm having trouble finding it.
We're soon launching an online course

Who is we?

btw - Every time I see a bunch of 130+ IQ engineers tackle education problems, I get optimistic about the future.

130+ IQ doing anything about any problem does not me give any hope unless those doing have a good understading about it. So far engineers have shown "if the only tool you have is a hammer…" attitude towards the problem than any other.
How do you know their IQs? I don't think I've ever heard anyone discuss their IQ in real life. I don't mean this as an attack; I'm just curious where the "130+ IQ" qualifier comes from.
I'm just saying that I like seeing smart people work on education.