Posted by Ivoah 10 hours ago
HN readers who can write a console game before bedtime are not the target audience. A handheld device that Just Works and creates an authentic experience is worth a lot.
For a college class, a $200 textbook isn’t out of line (the ones people still buy…), which makes this a very reasonable investment in one’s education.
Are there other, cheaper routes? Of course. For an introduction? Fewer, and nobody wants to be told to use learn the principles using Scratch - even if that can actually work.
Making something real is inspiring, and this feels real.
Knowledge is the only resource that only becomes greater the more is shared because people share back what they learned. Mind you this only works if people are paying it forward. But often the educator gets more from teaching than the student does.
The only downside is that there are still relatively few people with Playdates, and that puts an upperbound on how many people get to play your games.
There are a number of little handheld gadgets that you can use with MakeCode—scroll down on the homepage and there’s a section that shows them all:
I LOVE that he gets to code in Scratch but can jump into Python or JavaScript at any time without the IDE changing. It’s a clear stepping stone.
God knows how much I wanted to use and love it but it just started gathering dust in a closet after a week because of this.
It fits, in my head, very much in that same toy niche as Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operator series of music making devices: https://teenage.engineering/products/po