Hopscotch and Hakitzu for teaching coding

I am very impressed with the way that games like Hopscotch and Hakitzu teach coding. First of all they are fun, and they are well designed. Clearly, a lot of work, planning and thought went these games. I will not consider myself a coder, but I have been exposed to coding enough to believe that these games do introduce the player to the world of coding. The games require a way of thinking that coders must have. More specifically, the logic for coding is being developed in these games.

The question about learning something about coding through these games is hard to answer. I will need to play more time and then try to find ways to test is the knowledge is transferable to other platforms. To prove if the games do teach coding there must way of testing the knowledge outside of the games, and also a way of assessing this knowledge. On the other hand, if the games serve as introductions to coding and to demystify the language of coding in a way that when it is time to take a serious course in coding it is not extremely intimidating for beginners, I believe these games can probably achieve that. The player is presented gradually with a set of rules and a logic that then can be used to make connections in a coding course.

Playing, or coding, with Hopscotch while describing what I was trying to do was an interesting experience. Talking through the process in a way made it easy. It seems to me that adults still do that. If we are looking at a map we might verbalize the streets that we need to follow to get from point A to point B. Now, in Hopscotch, verbalizing actually makes it much easier to understand the procedure. I did not experience fiero while playing Hopscotch, in part I believe is because when I was able to make the program do what I wanted it to do, it just seems logic and expected. Meanwhile, when things did not work the way as expected it was easy to feel like a total beginner that doesn’t understand a thing about coding. In other words, failing seemed much more frustrating than the “fiero” of succeeding.