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by bluetshirt 4676 days ago
Is a graphing calculator really the most obvious way that a young and impressionable mind will find an inroads to programming in this day and age? I find that idea laughable. Tinkering on the web is the obvious modern-day equivalent that is completely neglected when talking about how hostile the modern environment is towards the young creative spirit.
1 comments
jlgreco 4676 days ago
It is easier to lug a graphing calculator around than a laptop, particularly in schools. I spent countless hours programming on my calculator while sitting in cars, hiding in the back pews at church, inside of tents during camping trips, sitting in the back row of classrooms,...

It was something I could do that caught my attention while forced to be someplace I had no interest in being. I don't think web development gets you that.

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bluetshirt 4676 days ago
Oh, it completely does. My niece this year is required to have a laptop for school. She has to have a PC with her. Now, she has no interest or aptitude for programming, but if any of her classmates do, they can easily fire up a web browser and get to hacking, even without an Internet connection.
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jlgreco 4676 days ago
That is rather alien to me, but I am pretty certain it is not the norm (my old school-district, where my mother is still a teacher, certainly doesn't have anything like that). Even so, I doubt an English teacher would take kindly to her pulling out her laptop in the middle of class... I've had plenty of university professors that would freak out if you tried that.

(Also keep in mind, that for most of the time-periods when calculator hacking was popular, web development was also a thing (I was heavily into this stuff during the late 90s and very early 00's). I did that stuff in highschool but it simply didn't interest me in the same way. Calculators were limited, and that presented both a challenge and a goalpost. Doing the same stuff with webdev? That is mundane and discouraging because you know that, at an entry level, you are not exploring the bounds of the medium in any meaningful way..

It is like the difference between seeing how fast you can go down a hill on a skateboard, and how fast you can go on the highway with your mother's minivan. Rotate a few triangles with webgl... or optimize a trig table in z80 assembly....

When I came home at the end of the day, I would fire up my PC and started editing some z80 assembly on it instead of programming the computer itself. Hell, I would test on a calculator emulator running on the PC...)

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bluetshirt 4676 days ago
Web development in the 90s and early 00s was not a practical substitute for learning how to program. Now, it is.

You make a claim that the low-level nature of the calculator programming was an enticement to you. That may be, but I would hestitate to generalize based on your own experiences. I would suspect that the ability to come up with something that actually does something conventionally interesting trumps the benefits of working close to the metal, ESPECIALLY with young, novice programmers. A few hours of hacking in assembler and you may get to hello world, whereas the same amount of effort in javascript might net you the ability to drag and drop objects around a UI. Which is more impressive to a kid?

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jlgreco 4676 days ago
> Web development in the 90s and early 00s was not a practical substitute for learning how to program.

Of course it was... many people did learn that way. If anything, it was more accessible then than now. Actually, 'substitute' nothing, something that is is not a substitute. That's not the point though, you could teach middle-schoolers to program with fucking Java if you wanted to, though of course you shouldn't.

Say you're a teenager and what to program "Snake". Are you going to get up off the ground with TI-BASIC or WebGL/whatever faster, and which is going to leave you more satisfied. On a calculator you have pushed something to its limits (in some limited way), with web-dev you have done nothing of the sort. Power and raw capability is not what you want from a teaching aid.

And to be clear, I am not arguing for a low-level next to the metal introduction to programming. (TI-BASIC is of course nothing of the sort.) I am arguing for giving children a pair of boots that fit, not a pair of boots suitable for industrial use. Something that they can properly fill out and master. Something with bounds that they can strive for and reach. Something that forces them to get clever when they reach those bounds.

If you think this is a bizarre concept, then look at Logo.

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