When I see tools like this, that allow children and adults to make things, using the same platform, I can only think Microsoft is it literally investing in the future. It's so easy to get wrapped up in what a tech company can produce now, or in a year that often times people forget about creating awesome tools. Tools last a lot longer than platforms or devices. While Minecraft is a slightly different example, its core success is simply that it is a creativity tool for all ages and skill levels. When I look at something like TouchDevelop, I see similarities. It's a tool that can let people create awesome things, easily. Something that oversimplifies things at first, but encourages and gives you the ability to push it farther if you desire.<p>Tech politics aside, kudos to you Microsoft.
I'm glad all the MSFT research initiatives are getting attention and/or the development stage. There's so much new amazing things to make the future so shiny and great.<p>As Steve Jobs pointed out, MSFT's overall design and communications have and are still... astoundingly nerdy. Yet this new MSFT, one that notes they made something with WUV!, is such a departure from Micro$oft of yore.<p>This is almost... dare I say, embryonic of an earnest attempt at something new? Almost as if this new MSFT is a startup of a corporation in a landscape dominated by the most valuable corporation on earth (AAPL) and the most useful corporation on earth (GOOG) and the most cutthroat corporation on earth (AMZN).<p>I imagine in another year or two there will be a major overhaul of Microsoft's design process to bring about cohesion. I'm hoping the likes of hiring Andrew Kim (<a href="http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2012/7/3/the-next-microsoft.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2012/7/3/the-next-micro...</a>) and other young talents will greatly influence that as it is sorely needed, much like how Google invested much into Matías Duarte and Material design.<p>Wow, imagine that. When the old question was can Apple be Google faster than Google can be Apple and now it's can Microsoft be Google faster?
I've been doing the hour of code with my 7 yr old daughter. She really enjoys it, so much so that I now get bugged more to "do coding" than to help her with her homework. She's going to love this!<p>As an aside - To all of you focused on making it easier for the next generation to learn and use these skills:<p>Thank you so much!
This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long long time. If I remember correctly Microsoft released something similar for Windows Phone but the UI was really clunky. This version (?) is amazing though, so much better.<p>I've just spent 10 minutes playing around and building a simple app sat on my sofa, I highly recommend spending a little bit of time using this.
It's great to see so many great investments in creative tools by Microsoft.<p>For those interested, Microsoft Studios (Team Dakota) has a great desktop/Xbox One game called Project Spark (<a href="http://welcome.projectspark.com/" rel="nofollow">http://welcome.projectspark.com/</a>) that is essentially a 3D game builder enabling you to build 3D games from scratch or "remixing" other games from the community. Games are constructed from visual blocks called "Kode". It evolved from a previous XBox game called Kodu Game Lab which was targeted strictly towards the education market [1]. You can install Project Spark for free on Windows 8 (I have it running in a Bootcamp partition on a Mac Mini and it performs well and is very fun).<p>[1] See <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Spark" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Spark</a> for more history.
Just played around with it a little bit!<p>Super interesting, can certainly see a couple of applicable use cases! The way the tutorials are setup will actually be handy for education, certainly if it would be possible to create your own tutorial.<p>Edit: Typo
I haven't been able to check it out fully yet, but all this hour of code stuff looks amazing!<p>Being able to launch a little tutorial project right in the browser with videos and all, for free...great job Microsoft!<p>I'm not a teacher but I can already see the amazing educational potential here. I love helping people who are learning to code, and then watching them complete their first small project on their own, very satisfying; this is a great tool.<p>Edit: The more I keep looking at this the more excited I get...really great job Microsoft Research!
This is awesome. And what's even more cool, that it seems to be localized to other languages! I'm a polish speaker, and when I launched one of the tutorials (Jetpack Jumper), not only the interface was translated, but even the intro video. I had friends that wanted to jump into programming but couldn't start because of the language barrier. That could turn out as a great tool for them!<p>Edit: Just noticed that they use Microsoft Translator for most of the tutorials, but still kudos to them for taking time and providing a proper translation in at least one of them.
The web page from the TouchDevelop team at MSR is more helpful to know what the project is: <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/touchdevelop/" rel="nofollow">http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/touchdevelop/</a>
It's like lively-kernel[1] with a layer of Scratch on top -- except it doesn't use WebDAV for storage, and you can't self-host the whole stack.<p>Still, very nice.<p>(Now I wonder if there's a service that allows you to list intersection of contributer to github projects... hmm.. there's an api, isn't there:)<p><pre><code> npm install -g json
cons=(https://api.github.com/repos/{LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel,Microsoft/TouchDevelop}/contributors)
comm -12 <(curl -s ${cons[0]}|json -a login|sort)\
<(curl -s ${cons[1]}|json -a login|sort)
#ed:spoiler alert: no overlap
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel</a>
Very nice. But why not have full keyboard support for the PC ?<p>I'm working on a very similar experimental editor for Clojure/lisp and my intention is to make it vi-like - navigate and perform the edits with the keyboard.<p>Some other ideas I'm experimenting with:<p>Customisable icons or even specific shapes for functions.<p>For example the function "show loading screen" can be represented as the actual visual screenshot of the loading screen.<p>The idea is to get rid of most of the syntax and leave only the user-defined names.<p>In 'interactive' mode, each form (block) can be executed and arguments can be entered right inside it.<p>Each function block could have a 'back side', where all the meta data about the function resides, like documentation and unit tests.<p>So visual programming is a new hot topic and there's a lot of stuff to explore in this area.
Here's some info about the language used:<p><a href="https://www.touchdevelop.com/docs/language" rel="nofollow">https://www.touchdevelop.com/docs/language</a>
I looked at this a while ago while seeking out a good language for my daughter to learn some simple programming with. While I liked it, I can't help feeling that all these "visual" substitutes for programming languages are counter productive. It is so tedious to create even simple loops and logical structures. Consider a simple for loop such as in python:<p><pre><code> for thing in ["cat","dog","tree"]:
print thing
</code></pre>
I can explain this to her and she can run it and see it do something, modify it in small ways, etc etc. The same thing in TouchDevelop actually looks <i>more</i> complicated and is <i>harder</i> to experiment with. I feel like we should teach computer languages as <i>languages</i> and not try to turn them into lego blocks.<p>I'm curious if others feel the same way or not? Have people had success starting with something like TouchDevelop and then transition to a non-visual language? Or do kids just get good at playing in the visual sandbox and never make the jump?
An alternative: <a href="http://www.algoid.net/index.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.algoid.net/index.php</a><p>"<i>Algoid is an educational app that uses a simple but complete language called Algoid Language (AL) to teach programming.<p>Target Audience: Kids, teenagers and adults interested in learning computer programming.</i>"
Pretty cool. Just sent this to my daughter to look at as well. She liked code.org's visual building, till it got in her way. This looks like you can dive into actual code if you want to. I think she'll like that.
I'm very glad this project is available but somewhat surprised how in awe some comments are here. How does this do a better job at teaching than etoys? Yes being able to deploy easily is a big deal, but given the length of time the smalltalk/squeak/etoys folks have been working on this idea I don't see how this project is garnering the level of admiration it is from HN folks.
Very interesting! So the language looks similar to Scratch and Blockly, but targeted to mobile web. I would like to see a comparison overview.<p>Anyone have a link to a published paper?
This is from Microsoft Research so I would expect there to be one, eventually, relating this to similar efforts.
>> 253523 scripts published<p>That's quite a large repository. Do they have collaborations with schools and organizations helping kids code?
Little buggy on desktop chrome, but may that is not the intended browser?<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/QVzTlqD.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/QVzTlqD.png</a>