How kids in a low-income country use laptops: lessons from Madagascar

Re:How kids in a low-income country use laptops: lessons fro... by zeta0134 on Friday April 06, 2018 @01:16AM (#16771052)

Funny you mention that! My first programming language was TI-BASIC, on an old TI-83 Plus. That language is wonderfully simple, slow enough to watch the execution happen almost in realtime, and tolerant enough that for the longest time, I didn't know what the "End" token did, and my programs would crash after a while, infinitely recursing into If blocks because I simply didn't know any better. Good times!

After a while, I figured out that all the best games were written in this mystical "Assembly" stuff, which ran a lot faster and could, with some wizardry, do greyscale! I taught myself z80 programming without ever stopping to think that it might be difficult. Later, I realized this is a Junior level college course in a great many degree programs. Who knew? For me, it was just another step on the path to making games instead of doing my math homework.

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Re:How kids in a low-income country use laptops: lessons fro... by rbanffy on Monday April 09, 2018 @12:04PM (#16794208)

The kind of BASIC that did fit on 8-bit computers is a non-intimidating low-level programming language. All variables are global, you have jumps and subroutines, but no named (multi-line) functions and conditionals most of the time end in jumps that go over a segment of code.

Conceptually, it's incredibly simple and I think this is its most important contribution.

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