[geek_at]

I was a CS teacher for 8 years and the way I was able to hook like 85% of classes was I was introducing them to Hackits [1]. They all loved it because they use the web so much and this gave them the feeling of being able to look inside the matrix

This was also how I got into CS many years ago. The old tricks still work

[1] https://blog.haschek.at/2014/why-hackits-are-the-first-thing...

[kareemm]

These are genius. Thanks for sharing. I'll definitely be sharing w/ my kids when they get old enough. What's your take on the lower bound where kids are generally capable of figuring these out?

[geek_at]

I was using this with the youngest kids in our school which were like 11 but for real learning benifit I'd recommend 13 and up

[Mezzie]

It's going to depend on the kid. I was doing this sort of thing at 4 or 5.

[soulofmischief]

Breaking peers into groups and letting them compete on wargames is also a fun exercise. Not sure how this will be impacted by LLM-powered coding software, however.

[iudqnolq]

I put the second puzzle into ChatGPT. It makes an extremely stupid mistake but gets lucky.

GPT gets JavaScript numerical semantics utterly wrong but the only non-integer operation is a red herring: "the result [of 14/3] is approximately 4.6667, but JavaScript will store it as 4 since we are not using floating-point numbers"

[soulofmischief]

Is this GPT 3.5, or GPT 4?

[iudqnolq]

3.5

[soulofmischief]

You should try with 4 and compare. 4 is leagues better.

[iudqnolq]

I've yet to be wowed by anything from gpt 3.5 I've gotten myself or 4 I've seen others post, so I'm not gonna buy it.

[mehere14]

I am bookmarking this website for when my kid is old enough. So please don't shut this down. Host it on cloud flare or something which has a good free plan.

[geek_at]

I detached the hackits from socialcube so now they are on a open source repo and here -> https://www.0xf.at/

[Dah00n]

It is already broken. If you follow the link in the blog post you get a 404:

https://www.socialcube.net/hackits

[geek_at]

https://www.0xf.at/ is the correct link, I'll change it in the blog post, thanks

[Dah00n]

Thanks!

[marcod]

Oh, reminds me of http://notpron.org/notpron/

[another_story]

These are great. Reminds me of some of the puzzles from hackthissite.org.

Do you mind me asking what you did after you left teaching?

[elboru]

You just unlocked a nice memory for me! I remember many years ago going to a website like that (probably the one mentioned in the blogpost) and feeling a lot of satisfaction every time I was able to “hack” the exercise. Thank you!

[bombcar]

This is similar to my hook for friends and family - show them how to use Inspect Element to change parts of the page they didn't think you could change.

That usually is an eyeopener to how the whole thing is working.

[musicale]

How well did the XP system work in practice? Did it seem to work well for learning or did students just learn how to game the system?

[jtchang]

These are fantastic!