Show HN: PickCode – An educational coding environment for students after Scratch

Re:Show HN: PickCode – An educational coding environment for... by lucasmullens on Monday July 25, 2022 @04:45PM (#32230674)

This editor is really impressive. I work at Google on Grasshopper's block-based mobile coding editor, and we've been exploring ways to help users transition from block-based coding to "real" coding. This looks like it does a great job finding a middle ground.

Things like missing parentheses and apostrophes can be really off-putting/confusing to new programmers, and this avoids that while still letting the user type something that's effectively real code.

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Re:Show HN: PickCode – An educational coding environment for... by majeedkazemi on Monday July 25, 2022 @06:56PM (#32232053)

This editor is amazing!! You should take a look at CodeStruct as well: https://code-struct.vercel.app/

We've had a similar goal and were trying to create a tool to help students transition from Scratch to Python using an intermediary structured editor that provides scaffolds such as handling syntax.

Here's a research paper that we published on CodeStruct: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3501712.3529733

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Re:Show HN: PickCode – An educational coding environment for... by csmeyer on Monday July 25, 2022 @07:40PM (#32232426)

I thought I had a pretty good knowledge of the literature but June 2022 is pretty recent :-) CodeStruct looks great!

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Re:Show HN: PickCode – An educational coding environment for... by emptysongglass on Monday July 25, 2022 @04:53PM (#32230766)

Question: are there any plans to offer anything other than JavaScript? Grasshopper has been on the market for a number of years now and still only offers the one.

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Re:Show HN: PickCode – An educational coding environment for... by lucasmullens on Monday July 25, 2022 @05:01PM (#32230859)

Not at the moment, but that's definitely our number one feature request. It takes a lot of work to add new languages, since all our curriculum would need to be rewritten.

Often a lot of new developers mistakenly believe the best thing for them to do is learn as many languages as possible, when learning the fundamentals of a single language is usually more useful.

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Re:Show HN: PickCode – An educational coding environment for... by macintux on Monday July 25, 2022 @10:41PM (#32233641)

Define “useful”.

To get a job? Probably. To really understand programming? I think learning a wide selection of different paradigms is more helpful.

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