Teaching Kids to Program with Hedy: A Gradual Programming Language • Felienne Hermans • GOTO 2022

Another one. funky video Goto conference in Amsterdam. This time about teaching children programming with the help of new Hedy. The report explains the need for a new language: To teach kids there is Sketch, which perfectly closes the requests of a small audience (more about how it appeared and what the concept can be read in the book of its author, Mitchell Resnick “The spiral of learning” (“Lifelong kindergarten”)Which I'm talking about. wrote) But as kids get older, they want to move to adult programming instead of visual programming. Usually, at this stage, children are offered Python as a default language for learning, but the transition is not painless for everyone - some children find it difficult to understand the complexity of the language's syntax, which distracts them from the semantics of creating programs and writing algorithms. As a result, some children at this stage fall off and cease to learn effectively.

As a result, the author has developed a research project in which the Hedy programming language has 18 level of difficulty and if the first level allows for almost everything, 18 The level is already a syntactically faithful subset of Python. And then this research project for 2 The year became quite popular, at some time even Guido van Rossum wrote about it, which doubled the bills Heroku had to pay for the author of the language. The language itself is open source, available on gihub It is quite interesting as a technical project, since the creation of languages, their translators and so on is a science-intensive field. (I remember when I was at the university, I had a course on the theory and implementation of programming languages and there was a lot of interesting stuff.). At the end of the speech, the author said that the project is waiting for contributors and if someone wants to participate, then "you are welcome."

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