Engaging 9-year-old software developers
In this session from DevRelCon London 2019, Max Kahan talks about the importance of play in developer education.
Summary:
Understand the problem with your product’s current interactivity and creative initiatives that let developers be creative.
Understand how you can help them using your product.
Test creative initiatives and get feedback.
If you want people to see that value, it’s really important to get it to a way that people can explore and be curious and let them play and be creative.
Understand the outcomes and measure how it has impacted the experience of your developers.
Scribbles:
The problem
This product does not feel intuitive.
It doesn’t feel intuitive and natural.
Hard to use.
Not the coolest thing in the world.
How can they help them?
Make it easier to see the value, easier for us to understand, and show developers why they should be using messaging and why they should care.
Make it easy to try out.
Give people opportunities to play because right now, it’s pretty hard to get going, so they want to give them that chance.
Children are very discerning customers.
They really made sure that they would appeal to them.
So they decided to use Scratch.
Scratch is an open-source project developed at MIT.
Basically, it’s a visual programming style.
It lets people click and drag things together like little blocks, and that shows the syntax of the program without worrying about the syntax of the program.
Max (speaker) decided to go away and try to make some things so that they could use messaging with Scratch.
“Where does my 9-year-old come in?”
They wanted the kids to be able to see the value.
They decided to find a real test subject.
His team lead has a 9-year-old son.
Using this and using this program, he was actually able to create a little game in Scratch.
But he was also able to save his score by putting it onto a messaging queue.
He was able to understand why he was doing that and why he was able to see his high scores again.
The Scratch Extension (Scratch X)
Program runs in a browser and communicates with a Raspberry Pi.
Basically, they’re allowing that to actually send messages and give them instructions.
Then, they're taking the score from here and they're putting it back to the program.
Gives a sequence of lights to be played on here, and the user then has to try and remember that sequence and play it back.
Outcomes
This has allowed them to actually go and talk to developers -- developer conferences.
It meant that they can actually now have a conversation with their developers, and with people who maybe want to understand why they should use messaging and what the value is.
Developers can see that value.
They found that their developers really do understand what’s going on here.
People actually get to have a play with something and they get to have some fun.
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