Ask HN: Would you buy this didactic game for your kid?

1 point

6 years ago

So one side-project of mine is a puzzle game where you teach the basic concepts of programming by playing with lasers, meaning no numbers and no letters at all, purely visual feedback loop for all interactions. Before pouring more time and effort into this project I would like to know if you guys think there is a market out there for a game like this? And more specifically if you would buy it for your kid? (given if you are on this site you pretty much know the usefulness of knowing programming concepts)

Here is the prototype for level 1: https://i.imgur.com/FGl3rpf.mp4, just letting the user know how it works and I guess some general "code-flow".

Here is prototype for level 2: https://i.imgur.com/CMHU6CE.mp4, introduces an item that is a simple logic gate, so it pretty much represents and "if/else" statement, albeit hard-coded with which color goes left (cyan) but future levels could ask the user to manually pick a color.

Level 3 doesn't exist yet but would introduce booleans, that is blue/cold orbs (false) vs red/hot orbs (true), and slowly all normal boolean operations would be introduced (inverting orbs aka "!", AND and OR operations, et al)

As an aside, to be able to introduce concepts such as arrays, loops and simple sort algorithms I later realized lasers are not a useful visual metaphor but "orbs" would be, so that's some extra work to redo.

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