April 17, 2013 at 11:32Hopscotch: the basics of programming for kids on the iPad
- Transfer
How to interest women in programming? Probably offering them affordable learning tools at a very young age - apparently this idea was in the minds of the creators of the Hopscotch iPad app, a new visual environment for creating simple apps.
Hopscotch is an object-oriented language that is made intentionally vibrant and colorful, suitable for children 8-12 years old. Instead of loading children with endless lines of code, creating Hopscotch programs is dragging and dropping various objects and scripts that can work with them. Objects are cute characters, and scripts can be selected from the drop-down menu or from the left menu. The result of children's work can be short animations and games.
I must say that Hopscotch is in a pretty good company: Codea has released a development environment for iPad that allows you to create applications using Lua (however, it is not aimed at children), and the market also has Tynker, another visual language similar to Hopscotch - he also relies on friendly objects that can be stacked like Lego.
At the heart of Hopscotch (as well as Tynker) is Scratch , a visual programming language developed at MIT. Scratch has been around for several years, however, it does not work on mobile devices. But co-founder and head of Hopscotch, Jocelyn Leavitt, says that "he is very popular and we like it."
Leavitt is a former history teacher with an interest in experimental teaching methods. She herself doesn’t code and, together with another founder, Samantha, John notes that “she would like Hopscotch to exist at the time we were growing up.”
Both founders want young people - especially girls - to start learning these tools as early as possible. They are suitable for boys, but more important for girls. Boys can get carried away with programming as they play video games with which little girls are passionate. "Girls love to create things." So the authors of the app put a lot of effort into creating characters that are cute, funny and vibrant: “This is something that girls will like, and they’re not too girlish.”
Hopscotch works on iPadand free. The authors have not yet determined the monetization model, but they are still inclined toward in-app purchases, such as premium drawings, virtual goods, or additional tutorials.
Hopscotch is an object-oriented language that is made intentionally vibrant and colorful, suitable for children 8-12 years old. Instead of loading children with endless lines of code, creating Hopscotch programs is dragging and dropping various objects and scripts that can work with them. Objects are cute characters, and scripts can be selected from the drop-down menu or from the left menu. The result of children's work can be short animations and games.
I must say that Hopscotch is in a pretty good company: Codea has released a development environment for iPad that allows you to create applications using Lua (however, it is not aimed at children), and the market also has Tynker, another visual language similar to Hopscotch - he also relies on friendly objects that can be stacked like Lego.
At the heart of Hopscotch (as well as Tynker) is Scratch , a visual programming language developed at MIT. Scratch has been around for several years, however, it does not work on mobile devices. But co-founder and head of Hopscotch, Jocelyn Leavitt, says that "he is very popular and we like it."
Leavitt is a former history teacher with an interest in experimental teaching methods. She herself doesn’t code and, together with another founder, Samantha, John notes that “she would like Hopscotch to exist at the time we were growing up.”
Both founders want young people - especially girls - to start learning these tools as early as possible. They are suitable for boys, but more important for girls. Boys can get carried away with programming as they play video games with which little girls are passionate. "Girls love to create things." So the authors of the app put a lot of effort into creating characters that are cute, funny and vibrant: “This is something that girls will like, and they’re not too girlish.”
Hopscotch works on iPadand free. The authors have not yet determined the monetization model, but they are still inclined toward in-app purchases, such as premium drawings, virtual goods, or additional tutorials.