Thanks for the pointer to CMU CS Academy. it’s an excellent resource with shared approach on learning through visuals. it seems to be more oriented to teachers but indeed is a great resource.
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.
your feedback is really helpful! yes, you are right on the range exercise. the course is not self-contained and I put more work on the lab but did not check on the logic sequence of terms and concepts.
on the hints, I am curious what works in your earlier work on writing tutor.
on the AI tutor, I originally allow a user ask a few qeustions without requiring login, but Claude advised against it for security reasons (possible abuse of unauthenticated model relay/call)
I tried to create a comprehensive environment to meet the needs of students and beginners who want to get into programming. Version 1.0 was released just a week ago, and I'm currently finalizing version 1.1, which should go live very soon.
My only feedback is $49 for AI slop feels like extortion at best, and delusion at worst. Don't give up building stuff, we should all be using AI to build ideas because the cost of developing them has dropped substantially. We should not be using them, however, to grift one another.
your criticism well received. Yes, AI was heavily involved, but the raw python content and core viz ideas grew out of my earlier informal teaching and coaching. The advanced labs add some complexity analysis and animation. And to be honest, the $49 price is just an experiment.
I dislike AI slop too, but we shouldn't be taking pricing feedback from anyone that isn't a potential customer, unless they are saying, "I wouldn't buy this at 49$, but I would buy it at 19$", it goes straight into /dev /null.
Also fwiw, 49$ one time is on the very low end for about any product except mass produced (not common on early startups). It would only miss the mark for $/mo in B2C
If I can't get a customer to shell out 50$, I'd rather mark the idea as lacking pmf than trying it out at lower price points.
oh thanks for the quick feedback. my bad that it was left over from the earlier starting code as a demo for the first module. I have now fixed it and the starter code is now partial, and will fail the checks unless the user completes the tasks.
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.
on the AI tutor, I originally allow a user ask a few qeustions without requiring login, but Claude advised against it for security reasons (possible abuse of unauthenticated model relay/call)
You can download it for free here: https://simpl-pseudocode.itch.io/simpl
Also fwiw, 49$ one time is on the very low end for about any product except mass produced (not common on early startups). It would only miss the mark for $/mo in B2C
If I can't get a customer to shell out 50$, I'd rather mark the idea as lacking pmf than trying it out at lower price points.