Learn programming with grids!

June 19, 2013 4:39 PM

'Lets Grid' is an online programming environment that is designed to get people into programming. I tried to strip away all of the complicated set-up that goes along with real-world programming and just give students the very basics they need to create cool things and share their creations with the world.
posted by Artw (10 comments total)

Sooo.... where's the turtle?
posted by pompomtom at 4:46 PM on June 19, 2013 [6 favorites]

Fun. And I like the livecoding aspect, too.
posted by DU at 4:49 PM on June 19, 2013

Logo Interpreter
posted by benzenedream at 5:21 PM on June 19, 2013 [3 favorites]

It would be helpful if rows & columns were labelled somehow.
posted by not that girl at 5:59 PM on June 19, 2013

I so badly want to understand this stuff but for some reason I cannot wrap my mind around it.
posted by gucci mane at 6:54 PM on June 19, 2013

This is what Processing (previously) already exists for: a simple framework that enables artists, students, and other non-programmers to start making graphics and art via programming. It's really easy to get started, you can quickly get to more interesting stuff, and eventually you can make some pretty amazing things.
posted by narain at 11:13 PM on June 19, 2013 [2 favorites]

It feels to me like this is another of the ten million different introductions to programming that are all too useless to go anywhere, become anything, or grow with the student. (I feel like I've wasted my time with dozens personally, hitting their limits before reaching anything amazing, and being forced to move along, move along, start again somewhere else, instead of being able to use that mastery to build higher). I'd like there to be something that genuinely scales, from tile-based sequences for 5-year-olds, all the way up to industrial-level development environments, as is more the case in some other fields... sometimes. I guess the closest so far might be Arduino, but that still clips off at both ends of the spectrum.(I'm aware that real programmers might be horrified at the thought of someone cocooned in a single paradigm from childhood, but I'm not a real programmer, I'm someone who often wants to just code something as a means to an end and is so sick of relearning the same wheel under a different name every time just because today's patchwork hodgepodge is all there is).
posted by anonymisc at 4:33 AM on June 20, 2013

Similar in flavor to AgentSheets. You write local rules for a cellular automata grid? I used AgentSheets to teach programming to high schoolers as part of a research program. The limitation of no global storage made things challenging and fun.
posted by grimjeer at 4:43 AM on June 20, 2013

I'd like there to be something that genuinely scales, from tile-based sequences for 5-year-olds, all the way up to industrial-level development environments, as is more the case in some other fields... sometimes.

Isn't this called LISP?
posted by leotrotsky at 7:50 AM on June 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

Isn't this called LISP?

I think almost any scripting language would apply, most of them are no more complicated to install than any other program... Python on windows is very easy to get going with, Tcl has something called "tcltutor" which teaches you tcl but is also a tcl interpreter for you to make programs in, you don't have to install anything for that I don't think, just download and run it.

When you learn to program in a more full powered language you often have to follow some examples where you don't actually know what everything in the IS or DOES but it's not like that really has to be a problem.
posted by RustyBrooks at 3:16 PM on June 20, 2013