I showed it to my 12-yo son. He wants to learn programming. Right now he's able to create complex machines in Minecraft, which are similar to programs and to electronic circuits.
Anyway, he was thrilled by jsdares because of the gaming approach. He was excited to do the first 3 robots tutorials, and then he got tired but asked me to send him the link to the site. Those were the first programming lines he wrote.
So, the overall experience of jsdares is awesome. As a suggestion to Jan Paul and team, please make it translatable so kids from around the world can benefit of it. There's already a few good introductions to programming in JavaScript in English, but very few ones in Portuguese using this new approach.
Unfortunately there are not many dares implemented yet, so he will not be able to follow a nice path from playing with robots to writing games. But anyone can create their own dares.
If you would like you could try to recreate the existing dares in Portugese. Better integration of different languages would be great at some point though!
It's one of the greater hurdles for teaching kids to code, in non-English countries. Everything is in English, which greatly impacts their ability to figure out most things for themselves. And you can't really expect kids under 12 to meaningfully decipher English (there's exceptions, yes).
That's the first reason I clicked the link--I thought the "visually" part in the title would perhaps be about something doing away with written language entirely, but alas :)
Anyway, if children are important in your audience, please consider (a support framework for) localization. In the technology world, you can usually expect people to be able to read and communicate English, it's the lingua franca. Most software gets diminishing returns for each language you add, many people even prefer English interfaces over their mother language (because so many industry-words are English--looking at you, Photoshop/GIMP). But with children, for every new language you add, it's like opening up an entirely new can of audience that simply wasn't able to work with your software before.
Completely agree with that. I just wanted to spend all my time on other features, but since it is an open source project my hope is that people will help me out with building things like internationalization! :-)
Anyway, he was thrilled by jsdares because of the gaming approach. He was excited to do the first 3 robots tutorials, and then he got tired but asked me to send him the link to the site. Those were the first programming lines he wrote.
So, the overall experience of jsdares is awesome. As a suggestion to Jan Paul and team, please make it translatable so kids from around the world can benefit of it. There's already a few good introductions to programming in JavaScript in English, but very few ones in Portuguese using this new approach.