Thread · HN Continuity

Most of teaching kids to code is them understanding terminology, structure, and getting them unstuck. This has bits of information mixed with unscaffolded terminology all over the place, some hidden in collapsibles, and some just missing.

For example the `range` example in the second activity doesn't show a `for` loop's structure, how `range` is called, or what it does. One of the hints shows you the syntax for a `range` call, but nothing about loop syntax.

The hints are on request rather than at-need, and aren't linked to what's going wrong for them - doing some structural analysis of the code to decide what hint might be needed would make hints more useful. The couple of activities I looked at didn't have particularly useful hints that targeted real problems and were more of the "here's a snippet of completed code" variety, which doesn't teach anyone anything.

I'd recommend going and looking into some teaching pedagogy before building stuff, tbh.

The actual activity objectives don't look too bad, but the UI is a mess of the wrong sorts of information to help kids learn the principles.

I was curious about the tutor, but not curious enough to hand over an auth token to it. I've been building a writing tutor using local models for my kids, and it's been an interesting experience trying to provide helpful, structured information at the time they need it, rather than just asking for answers, or parsing generic advice.