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0 pointsesafak2y ago0 comments

I don't think so. You can easily play around in the browser, using Javascript, or on https://processing.org/, https://playground.tensorflow.org/, https://scratch.mit.edu/, etc.

If anything the problem is that today's kids have too many options. And sure, some are commercial.

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Mezzie2y ago

There's a huge difference between something being gamified and something being play, particularly unstructured play. Scratch is great, but it's structured and something presented by adults to children for learning. That has a whole bunch of social baggage attached as well as a 'win' condition set by adults. Also I'd say that the transition to hackerdom probably could truly take place at late elementary/middle school age and at that age anything 'kiddie' or designed for kids is lame, making it less likely that children will use it for building their own communities. This is pretty common with most of the options. It's why I wouldn't consider things like Roblox to lead to hacking because it's still a supervised playground with content 'rules'.

TensorFlow probably will lead/is leading to some hackers.

zubairshaik2y ago

While I see your point, I think you're not giving Scratch enough credit. Admittedly, I don't know the culture around it today but back when I was a child the Scratch community was made up of kids who were there by choice, not because adults presented it to them. I certainly found it on my own, and had a swell time tinkering with it.

> That has a whole bunch of social baggage attached as well as a 'win' condition set by adults.

I'm not sure what you mean by this? I don't remember anything about winning besides the whole social media aspect of trying to get popular among all the cool projects that other people had by getting the largest number of likes and remixes.