No, please don't apologise. Thank you for brining up a great point!
Running something as complex as Lichess is... unwieldy when all I wanted was something I can quickly spin up in 5 mins on nearly any server, with a simple mobile interface for my father-in-law and child, and easy-to-debug (Lichess uses websockets which are often blocked by state firewalls).
If you don't have to deal with an amorphous state actor and a very different Internet culture, then please use Lichess. :)
Thanks! :) I feel like there is a dreadful lack of local-only apps that are runnable on a single simple server, now that everything is overly distributed. Should we bring back more P2P apps?
+1 My kids and I had a lot of fun with Pico-8, building simple games and learning basic geometry.
The community (inherited from Pico-8) is already implementing cat/wget/grep[1] and, of course, Minesweeper[2] in Picotron! Whatever Joseph White/zep is building brings back the early days of Internet and IRC where the everybody builds and shares unashamedly while having a ton of fun!
Thank you zep for making computing fun again for more mere mortals!
I'm curious how old your kids were when they started hacking on PICO-8 code?
My son (7yo) likes block-based programming (using Scratch, Scratch Jr and Octostudio) and Minecraft, but I'm wondering what a smooth on-ramp might be for PICO-8 or similar.
I got my first computer when I was about 10yo, so I was content to read through the books that came with it to learn the basics of BASIC and a little 6502 assembly. But I don't think that will work due to age, availability of other devices etc.
My kids are 12 and 14 and I can't get them interested in coding beyond what they might do at school. They showed an interest in Scratch, but I believe I introduced it WAY too early. Moreover, it moved them too quickly past the creative aspects and into writing code. Also, years later, I showed them PICO-8 and they weren't terribly interested.
In hindsight, I would recommend working with them at a young age (<10) to design game art and ideas. Then, the parent implements it and ports it to a portable platform. The child sees the creative aspects and the final output, but is shielded from the coding side in the early days. I imagine a child playing a game they designed on paper with crayons would be really satisfying. It would almost be like magic!
Then, let the transition to the coding side happen more organically or through a school program or some such. Maybe when they finally ask, "So, parent, how do I actually code these games?"
That's what I've been doing with one of my kids. They're designing the sprites and maps in the PICO-8 sprite editor and I'm taking the lead on showing them how to do the rest.
They've also enjoyed tweaking the sprites of existing PICO-8 games.
StoryChopsticks entered into a copyright agreement with six young authors aged between 7-11 years.
As a part of their Chinese language learning process, these young students are guided by their facilitators to create their own Chinese storybook, experiencing the highs and lows of the creative publishing process.
This contract signifies an important step towards owning intellectual property, building a pipeline for income generation, and above all, learning to make a mark in the world.
To show your support for these young and passionate authors, please join us for the launch of their book on March 25th (Saturday) at 11am GMT+8.
