It's like mit scratch. Except the underlying purpose is to sell junk food, the only sprite you can control is a corporate mascot, and you do so alone instead of in a social platform.<p>The focus on problem solving may be good for helping kids learn and practice solving problems procedurally. The free form nature of scratch gives a lot of freedom for goofing off, which can be a good thing.<p><a href="http://scratch.mit.edu" rel="nofollow">http://scratch.mit.edu</a>
Pocky has been expanding into the US. It used to only be available in Nijiya Markets, at a big markup over the price in Japan. Now it's in US movie theaters.<p>Maybe we'll get Calorie Mate food blocks next. Programming with Calorie Mate could become a thing.<p>The "lay out a pattern with physical objects, take a picture, analyze, and build program" approach is interesting. Like most forms of visual programming, it won't scale, but it's cute.<p>Now someone into Minecraft should build something where you build with Legos, take a picture, and import into Minecraft.
I just went to the supermarket here in Japan to hunt down some of these Pocky. At least the ones they had did not promote this, so they are using the candy programming app as a promotion to get people to buy the candies, but the candies in store are not promoting programming.
I just bought four special imported flavors the other day and I don't feel guilty at all for it.<p>Pocky is great.<p>This sounds pretty cool though.
It looks like this translates Pocky in different positions to lines of code and then executes that code. This is too many levels of abstraction even for me to make sense of as a professional programmer... I like where their heart is but I think this would be a terrible introduction to coding.
I'm not sure that a brand of chocolate-covered carbohydrates sponsoring sedentary behavior like coding is something that should be celebrated.<p>Hours spent coding should be followed or broken up by physical activity, not sugary treats.
Maybe Snapple or Dove Chocolates could add some programming related knowledge under their labels / caps. That'd be kind of fun and apparently you get an easy press release out of it.
Just please don't call it paw-key. It's poe-key (rhymes with low-key) although in truth there's a gap between poe & key<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gIrqQhwkM" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gIrqQhwkM</a><p>And yes I know someone is going to complain it's not English. So what. Neither is the pronounciation of pizza. If you can bother to say pee-tsa instead of piz-ah you can bother to say poe-key instead of paw-key