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

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.