Quote Originally Posted by Wolfie View Post
Part of me says "Good for them". Part of me says "What are you thinking?".

I think that teaching kids to program and then translating that into a tactile object is a real learning tool. But... Its like teaching them to speak Iconian instead of English. Sure, sounds cool, but where in the real world are they going to use it? They certainly are not going to go out and get a job based on a resume that says they can program in Madeup.

To be honest, teaching them a more mainstream programming syntax such as Java, C, Python or Basic would serve them far better in the real world. Those languages are employable and marketable. Madeup is not and will not be. Instead, I think it would be far more productive in the long term for them to write a 3D app that responds to a more mainstream language than working on an app that understands a new language nobody else supports or understands.
Hi, I'm Chris, the Kickstarter project creator. I offer a couple of points in response to your statement:


  • Most introductory programming courses are taught in Java, C, Python, or Basic, but only about 66% across the globe make it through their first programming course.
  • I just saw the results of a study done with BlueJ, a Java learning platform, that indicates that while syntax issues are frequent amongst new programmers, they are also the most quickly fixed.


In my 10 years of teaching, I've found algorithmic thinking to be the far more challenging issue for new learners. We are abstract thinkers, and slowing our mental processes down to the point that we can feed the steps into a machine is where I want to spend my time.

Madeup is an imperative language like all these others you mention, and the differences are superficial. The ideas of loops, conditional statements, functions, and arrays are not syntactic ideas; they easily transfer from one language to another.

I could have written a library for one of these languages, but by moving into a context where I am always thinking about space and nothing but space, I can better keep my mind on the algorithm instead of the packaging of the code. The benefits of domain specific languages are hard to deny.

Also, in the realm of spoken languages, it has been found that one year of Esperanto learning and three years of French learning produces better French speakers than four years of French learning.