That said, I do think the translation into a physical card game means that kids aren't getting the experimentation and near-instant feedback that they'd be getting if they were doing this digitally.

In order for a kid to "win," they either have to already know, or explicitly be told using words, what all of the commands do. Then they have to hear the parent analyze their solution, and tell them where they went wrong. Picture, however, a different game, played online: A kid has no idea what "sort" does, but when they link the "sort" command to a blob of text, all the lines are sorted in order. Now no one has told them what this command does, but they've discovered it. By playing the role of a scientist discovering these commands, they might actually gain an intuitive understanding of them.

I'm thinking of the board game "robot turtle," where kids needed to create a "program" of commands to move a turtle to a goal. When they did that, they had near-instantaneous feedback: the parent moved the turtle. If the kid mixed up their left with the robot's left, the failure was obvious. But if the game has been re-made so that there was no board, and the parent and kid just needed to talk about whether the turtle would actually end up seven paces forward and three paces to the left -- i.e. doing it all verbally -- it wouldn't have been nearly as powerful.

So I'm not raining on this, I can see this as very cool. But I am having a hard time imagining it's the best way to learn to pipe together commands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

At least it was just $5 but I think it's 1000% more fun to actually use a unix terminal with some sort capture the flag kind of game.

2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047110 (41 comments)

2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687 (59 comments)

When little Johnny gives teacher his 2000 line essay consisting of 1998 empty lines flanked by My 2000 line essay and That's all Folks! teacher will give Johnny a 1 or an F (depending on locality, might even be E where silly rabbits banned 'F' scores). But teacher, I played this here game of cards where empty lines did count won't be accepted as valid reasoning.