Engaging 9-year-old software developers
In this session from DevRelCon London 2019, Max Kahan talks about the importance of play in developer education.
Video
- 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.
- This product does not feel intuitive.
- It doesn’t feel intuitive and natural.
- Hard to use.
- Not the coolest thing in the world.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.