Comment by njoyablpnting
21 hours ago
Have been teaching coding to kids professionally for a while now. Ultimately what works is what the kid will engage in. Some kids bounce off of Scratch completely but then get totally hooked on text programming. I've been following what little has been published around teaching coding with AI, I'd say it's inconclusive at best which also tracks with my experience. We don't totally ignore it, since it is a standard development tool now, but if the environment is not tightly constrained it can be detrimental, it can quickly spit out a bunch of code that makes the student very overwhelmed.
You'd be surprised what kids can make once you give them the basic building blocks: https://jump.academy/projects/fruit-drop
Sometimes we will let them use AI to make a focused change to their project, like "make the character do a flip when he jumps", then they're getting a fairly controlled diff surrounded by a ton of context, which I think really does boost their coding "literacy". I'd rather my students be able to read code well than write a for loop from memory, so I've found it useful in that sense.
That was fun. Emma did a great job building Fruit Drop!
The comments on this HN thread are all very confusing to me and making me wonder if I read a different article altogether.
For instance, I am wondering what exactly you are responding to with this comment, since the game described in the article is not really about teaching the kid to code with AI at all? I mean, what you wrote is interesting, but it isn't really topical
The blog post that I read mentions a single generative AI feature baked into the game that allows the player to create a single item once per day using a text prompt. But it is one single feature with limited uses. The blog post devotes very little ink towards describing it, and it is very clear that the goal of the project is not to use AI to teach coding, but more to provide a constrained, hackable sandbox environment with a deliberately impaired scripting language -- so, lots of "basic building blocks" as you say.
Was there something else in the post that I missed?
> For instance, I am wondering what exactly you are responding to with this comment
It's an ad for their website.