[HN Gopher] The Xylophone Maze: Screen-free coding for children
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The Xylophone Maze: Screen-free coding for children
Author : b6dybuyv
Score : 166 points
Date : 2024-02-22 11:09 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (20y.hu)
(TXT) w3m dump (20y.hu)
| alaintno wrote:
| It's an amazing idea! I'm always looking for screen-free
| activities related to problem solving with my daughter. By the
| way, if someone happens to have other examples, it would be great
| to share!
| earlyriser wrote:
| A similar game but not DIY is
| https://www.thinkfun.com/products/robot-turtles/
| throwaway89201 wrote:
| Getting someone else to do something is really hard if they
| take your instructions as literally as with a programming
| language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waP5vkMaYjg
|
| Another example in Dutch [1] (with activity sheet here [2])
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BcZBl-BKhQ
|
| [2] https://www.leukekinderactiviteiten.nl/wp-
| content/uploads/20...
| tkgally wrote:
| My four-year-old grandson and I enjoy playing with go stones on
| a go board. The black and white stones and board's grid lines
| inspire a lot of counting and geometric-shape activities.
| Similar things could be done with other types of objects, of
| course, but I had the stones and board from when I used to play
| go forty years ago.
|
| My daughter wants me to teach him how to play go at some point,
| but he's not quite ready for that. He hasn't yet learned the
| concept of winning or losing at games, and we don't see any
| need to force that on him early. In the meantime, playing with
| and talking about the stones seems to have boosted his
| understanding of numbers.
| prismatix wrote:
| I think the "Peanut Butter Sandwich Instructions" game could
| fit into this category as well. For kids who can't write, you
| can do the actions in real time. For kids who can, have them
| write down instructions first then "run" the program. Teach
| them to "debug" or test their program along the way.
| flippy_flops wrote:
| Every year I teach a few weeks of "coding" at my kids
| elementary school. I always start with the Peanut Butter
| Sandwich and it's a huge hit. For time's sake, i print & cut
| out 30-40 random instructions like "openTheBag();" or
| "holdJellyOverBread();". They get in 4 groups, choose which
| instructions to use, and put them in order.
| hoc wrote:
| Well, for AI, the "Matchbox Computer"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_an...
| Pete-Codes wrote:
| Nice idea for something without screens
| NateEag wrote:
| See also Turing Tumble, a screenless, mechanical, gravity-powered
| computer for kids:
|
| https://upperstory.com/turingtumble/
|
| My sons (7 and 9) love it, and both have some grasp of binary
| thanks to it.
| ddol wrote:
| Upper Story's Turing Tumble and Spintronics are solid
| favourites in our house too. Weaving a graphic novel into the
| instruction / tutorial book is a brilliant tactic which really
| helped my eldest grasp the concepts covered.
|
| Spintronics also helped give me a new perspective on electrical
| current, current division and capacitance. Seeing and feeling
| resistance in the chain, how little/no load results in high
| current (chain link throughput) was more valuable than the
| "water in a hosepipe" analogies I learnt in my University EE
| classes. Really looking forward to induction in the expansion
| set.
|
| I was curious about the company, and discovered that the co-
| founders are a husband and wife couple who were in engineering
| and education respectively before starting the company. I'm
| glad to see they are able to operate profitably without listing
| on Amazon, and hope they continue to release more excellent
| educational engineering toys that I can explore with my kids.
| zwily wrote:
| My kids also love Turing Tumble. (Me too!) Highly recommended.
| pulkitsh1234 wrote:
| > The robot must not look at what color bar was hit but rather
| carefully listen to the sound only.
|
| Nice recipe for developing perfect pitch :-)
| o11c wrote:
| Hm, is perfect pitch stable across puberty?
|
| One of my observations is that humming a note within my valid
| vocal range has "feeling" differences even within the hard
| cutoffs (usually about 2 octaves for most people). But those
| cutoffs (and presumably the feelings) move between childhood
| and adulthood.
|
| (As an adult, my perfect pitch is not completely stable - if I
| don't use/tune it regularly, it can drift up to 2 semitones,
| but no further regardless of how long between tunings.
| Unfortunately I never did tests as a child.)
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| This is wonderful.
|
| There's a market for a pre-built set like this, with preplanned
| mazes to produce popular children's songs.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Just make sure your xylophone is actually in tune. Its sad how
| many cheap kids toys look like musical instruments but don't
| sound correct
| _spduchamp wrote:
| This is an excellent activity in that it has multiple modalities
| for tacit learning. Keep in mind that when you are playing with
| young children, it is the time you are spending together that is
| most important, so if they want to not follow the rules, make up
| new games, or just bang away on that xylophone, let them, and
| enjoy the time you have.
| epage wrote:
| To add: make sure you include unstructured play where the kid
| leads out without any structure from the parent (rules, etc).
| Instead, play with and have them lead you.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Fun idea! Clear objectives and simple tools. It's also a remote
| control example.
|
| I find that "algorithmic thinking" is too artificial for young
| kids. They are very versatile in a richer set of methods, which
| often are mutually conflicting yet lead to desired result.
|
| Once we played with a programmable mouse that needs to find
| cheese. Very predictably, the most used button was "do a trick",
| which makes mouse make funny noise without moving further...
| Sweet times for the kid, doomed moments for the teacher.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I would argue young kids are very good at logic and reasoning,
| but they lack self moderation controls and the context of The
| Real World.
|
| For example:
|
| Parent: "We're not going to have ice cream today."
|
| 3yo: "If we don't have ice cream today, can we have ice cream
| tomorrow?"
|
| Or, more commonly:
|
| 3yo: "What if we have ice cream today and no ice cream
| tomorrow?"
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Or, even more commonly:
|
| 3yo: "What if we have ice cream today _and_ ice cream
| tomorrow too? ". Because small children know better than to
| constrain themselves to artificially restricted choices
| offered by parents.
|
| Source: experience from navigating such negotiations for the
| past 1.5 year with my now almost-5 daughter.
| ca_tech wrote:
| I wish I could find the source, but I'll relay it less
| eloquently. Children have a remarkable ability to ask for
| things they know they can't have. Their innocence gives
| them the audacity to ask for the impossible.
|
| This always stuck with me. I sometimes catch myself when I
| self-curate questions to eliminate what I "know" will be
| impossible.
|
| It also has led me to sometimes just say "yes" when I get
| those questions, just to impart a bit of expanded
| possibility into their life.
| mdonahoe wrote:
| My daughter and I play "dadbot" where I'm the robot and she has
| to give me clear instructions on what I should do. It started
| after I showed her https://lightbot.com/ but we like the "screen-
| free" nature of dadbot better.
|
| Eventually she jumps on my back and the game doesn't last much
| longer because dadbot gets tired.
| throwaway89201 wrote:
| The first (Flash) version is playable here:
| https://dagobah.net/flash/light-bot.swf
|
| It has a pretty steep learning curve if you're not experienced
| with building a program step-by-step from another perspective
| and you're only able to run it. The mobile version is a lot
| more gentle and has more content, but I think less challenging
| and less fun.
| mdonahoe wrote:
| Yeah she and I prefer the flash version too.
|
| The music is great, and sitting together at a computer is a
| better collaborating experience than the mobile app.
|
| Unless you're on a roadtrip.
| thih9 wrote:
| I like the sneaky missing block.
| ribs wrote:
| This is a wonderful idea, and although I don't have kids, I think
| I want to have the pieces to put it together for when there's one
| to play with.
| SamBam wrote:
| I played Robot Turtles [1] with my kids, a boardgame with a
| similar idea: The kid can lay out cards that define what the
| turtle should do, and the adult moves the turtle exactly as
| instructed. Slightly different because, like in the original
| Logo, you can say "turn left" or "turn right," and it can be hard
| for the kids to remember that left and right are from the
| perspective of the turtle, whichever way they are currently
| facing.
|
| By about age 7 or 8 it stopped being fun, because the kids could
| pretty much lay out an entire one-shot sequence of cards that
| solved the maze. (We never really got into trying to code
| "functions," it never quite seemed to be intuitive in the context
| of the game.)
|
| 1. http://www.robotturtles.com/
| dkasper wrote:
| I feel like a next level would be RoboRally. One of my all time
| favorite "programming" games. I think it may still be in
| production
| WorldMaker wrote:
| One silly, maybe extreme, direction to move to try to explore
| building functions together is Alligator Eggs:
| https://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/
| darepublic wrote:
| First off I love this analog programming idea. I have young
| children who I would love to try this out with.
|
| Maybe missed something in skimming through the blog post but
| seems like primarily it's simulating doing up/down/left/right and
| navigating a character through a maze. For some reason this seems
| to be the most popular approach for apps that teach kids
| programming.
|
| i.e. https://kodable.com, which one of my kids is into and
| https://codecombat.com, which has been around for a while now.
|
| I think this paradigm (navigating a character using "move"
| function invocations) is good but kind of exhausts its usefulness
| after a while. I question whether my daughter learns coding this
| way or just is playing a turn based top down platformer. The most
| code like thing is when you use 'loops' to have characters repeat
| sequences of moves. I think when kids grok these things these
| apps become just types of glofiried education flavoured video
| games. There are a lot of things in kodable for instance that I
| feel are just basic web games with coding terms slapped on it.
|
| https://scratch.mit.edu/ is more like 'programming' imo, even at
| the level of the objective -- having a blank canvas to create
| something. It seems a little advanced for my kids right now
| though.
| dylan604 wrote:
| How is this programming rather than just learning how to
| recognize musical notes. Also, would this then start to associate
| these colors with these notes in any weird ways later in life?
| I'm not talking synesthesia or anything, but I can remember the
| music I was listening to at the time of reading a book or think
| of the book when I hear the music. Unless, that's the programming
| pkoiralap wrote:
| Here are my two cents on why this is programming.
|
| 1 cent: Every hit is an atomic action that is causing the robot
| to take a certain action. Furthermore, all points in that maze
| has a decision (from at most 4 different choices) to make. So,
| hitting on a note (making a choice) is like writing an if
| statement. Furthermore, you can ask them to come up with the
| color combinations to hit before hand and try to run it all at
| once. If it fails, you do it again.
|
| 2 cents: Since this is designed for 2-3 year olds, if
| statements make a good basis for starting programming or logic
| in general. As they grow older, we can introduce loops and
| functions.
|
| Moving on to the next question about starting to associate
| colors with notes although avoidable by randomly assigning
| colors to the notes (glue and paper), is possible like you
| said. However, I would like to claim that it will only stick
| (no pun intended) if the same colors play the same notes for
| years, if not months. Which given how two year olds are, is
| highly unlikely. They are done with a toy in about a week or
| two, max a month, give or take.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > if the same colors play the same notes for years, if not
| months.
|
| I wouldn't be so sure. As I stated, I have an association
| between book<=>music which was made within the days it took
| to read said book
| pimlottc wrote:
| This is cool, just be aware it could be frustrating if a child
| has any sort of colorblindness, particularly since the Duplo
| blocks are different shades than the xylophone. It would help if
| the blocks had letters on them to match the notes as well.
| dcsommer wrote:
| I love this idea! I can't wait to try it with my son when he gets
| a couple months older. By the way, what you have there is a
| glockenspiel. A xylophone is made with wooden bars, not metal as
| you have. It's a common mistake!
| samatman wrote:
| I'm aware of what the xylo- in xylophone means. But words mean
| what we use them to mean, not what pedants insist upon, and in
| vernacular, you're wrong, not him: the meaning of xylophone
| includes metallic instruments in the same style.
|
| In musicology, sure, these distinctions are useful there. But
| what I want to stress is that _you are wrong_ in this context.
| Not technically correct: wrong. The only mistake was you
| choosing to reply the way you did. It is, to be fair... a
| common mistake. Around here at least.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I knew both words when I was about 5, as we had both
| instruments at the back of the classroom.
|
| Your approach leads to calling them all sticks.
| sam_goody wrote:
| In my mind, all of programming can be reduced to the following 4
| concepts.
|
| - variables - conditions - loops - functions
|
| If there was a way to teach those concepts screen-free, even to
| adults, I would really love to know it.
|
| ThinkFun has a game CodeMaster that teaches loops and
| conditionals, but my kids found it way to tedious to play. It is
| better than nothing.
|
| Maybe some HN'er has an idea how to create some game for all
| these concepts?
|
| (And, if there is any other core concept I am missing, I would
| love to hear that too.)
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