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.
From reading the article it sounds like Pocky did something much more interesting than that. They are doing object recognition to use the candy as symbols in a programming language. Sounds a bit different from what you suggest.
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.
as popular Pocky is in Japan, Japan isn't going to go through inventory everywhere as fast as a lot of countries eat sweet snacks. They actually eat sensibly there. Expect the stock to replenish at slower pace.
>Hours spent coding should be followed or broken up by physical activity, not sugary treats.
Yeah, we should force kids to go run laps around the block every time they complete a few dozen lines, or master a new concept. That'll motivate them to learn!
Instead of being caustic why don't you actually rebut my point?
We could/should do more to encourage kids to lead a healthy lifestyle and to balance hours sitting at the computer with sports or working out instead of eating unhealthy junk food.
Do you really think a company would run this campaign if they didn't think it would result in more kids buying pockys?
Please calm dawn. Also, why do you assume 'sithadmin downvoted you? Do you have proof? Last time I checked, HN didn't give away the names of downvoters to downvotees.
> Do you really think a company would run this campaign if they didn't think it would result in more kids buying pockys?
Well of course they run it to increase sales. That's a problem with advertising in general, not with this particular company or campaign idea. Or am I misunderstanding your criticism here?
Well, you need to fuel your brain somehow. Salad ain't gonna cut it. ;).
> Hours spent coding should be (...) broken up by physical activity
Please don't. It's hard enough to find two or three hours of uninterrupted time as an adult. Kids and teenagers can pull off impressive feats of quick learning and skill acquisition in big part because they have long stretches of uninterrupted time. Don't take away the opportunity they have.
For you, maybe. I understand that fitness is growing to become a new mainstream religion in the West, but not everyone wants to participate in this.
That said, I'm not saying one should not have a healthy lifestyle. Sure, encourage more physical activity. But for the love of Great Maker, do not break up the time kids spend on intellectual tasks or hobbies into small chunks. You can do fitness rituals in 15-minutes stretches, but you can't do anything that requires any kind of creativity or focus in that time.
If you mean Pomodoros, then it doesn't count - the whole idea of "Pomodoro break" is to be short and spent in such a way as to not really break you out of focus.
If you can just sit down at random times and immediately code for 20 minutes with full focus, please tell us your secret. It sounds like a superhuman skill.
I do the same thing, 30 minute stints, 3-5 minute breaks. Occasionally if I'm really rolling I'll just keep going but I generally make sure to stop for breaks.
The key is to do things that won't get you mentally distracted, has a good stopping point, and lets you mentally rest.
Good breaks:
- I walk around the building
- Watch a short comedy youtube video
- Scroll through memes/comics
- Read blog posts, usually ones that aren't too detail-oriented and with good stopping points (Coding Horror is a good example)
- Listen to an instrumental music song (no lyrics), close my eyes, maybe get some fresh air.
Bad breaks:
- Start a long email
- Other projects.
- Anything mentally taxing or stressful (don't pay bills on break, don't try to figure out what you'll have for dinner)
- Read an exciting book that you don't want to put down
Doing this helps me stay focused all day. Over an 8 hour shift I take breaks for approx 48-80 minutes (plus lunch), so at most a little over an hour is wasted--versus burning out after just a few hours, writing bad code that I then spend the next day cleaning up.
This further translates into me being able to work some more on some side projects when I get home without getting burnt out--and not always programming, but other mental work like writing, art, meal planning, etc.
I'd question how effective a 15-minute fitness session is; it usually takes me that long to get really warmed up, not to mention the time it takes to get cleaned up after I'm done.
It really depends on who you ask. Some people may prioritize being the best programmer they can be over being healthy, but it's undeniable the connection between healthy body and a healthy mind.
As I am a fan of the lazy programmer theory, we should be encouraging people to be lazy now, so that the biochemical effects of physical activity may be effortlessly emulated by a brilliant technical workaround later. The more smart people we have working on exercise-free health, the better.
Your selfish act of keeping your own body healthy with literally dozens of minutes of pointless kilocalorie-burning and wasted watts every week is a Nash equilibrium choice. Think of all the benefits to society that could be realized if no one ever needed to exercise to stay healthy. But if you're healthy now, you have no particular incentive to cheat death. You're taking brains out of that innovation lottery.
Come on, people. We can automate people out of their paying jobs, but can't automate exercise out of existence?!
Perhaps there is a sort of cognitive dissonance in play. People who have remained healthy their entire lives by disciplined application of exercise would undoubtedly feel betrayed and devalued when people can achieve the same results with drugs and implants.
/s
Programming and doing exercise are not entirely rivalrous tasks, but I can get a lot done in 3 hours if I am completely focused and entirely uninterrupted (even from self-sourced interruptions).
Everyone's a critic, huh. Kids will spend time eating snacks and playing video games, as the past couple few decades have proven. Making those video games intellectual is an improvement. Sometimes the answer doesn't have to be the ideal, it just has to be better than the status quo.
Somebody should develop an free open source high fiber visual programming language based on celery stalks, cucumber slices, carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes, avocado slices, and radishes. That will keep your expressions regular!
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.
There are many similar programs/games, where you program through icons instead. There is some science behind suggesting there is some transfer to real world programming from that.
As far as I recall, children can learn "Computational Thinking" without having to concentrate on the often heavy syntax of programming.
I agree with you that setting up candy on a table, to take a photo of it and then getting some game-character to move accordingly, sounds a bit far fetched and might not give enough to actually learn programming. But it could definitely work to some extent, and if nothing else it sounds like a great markething scheme.
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.
Maybe we'll get Calorie Mate food blocks next. Programming with Calorie Mate could become a thing.
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.
Now someone into Minecraft should build something where you build with Legos, take a picture, and import into Minecraft.
I'm going to anal-retentively nitpick you and proclaim that Pocky was available in places like Yaohan (now defunct) [1] before Nijiya [2] even existed. ;)
If you could do that with the actual Minecraft legos (or just legos in general, but the minecraft legos are the write size and shape already), that would be killer. Probably have to take an angled sideview and a top view, at least. But yeah, would be very cool.
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
To be that nitpicky asshole, "pizza" as an example doesn't really do anything to argue your case because there's plenty of non-English-language brands that Americans typically pronounce with an English pronunciation (Volkswagen, IKEA, Nutella, etc.)
It doesn't matter if people understand you. It's fine if you want to say it like it's said in Japanese, but don't be pedantic and make others feel bad for saying it a specific way.
Do you correctly pronounce "Nikon" as "Nee con", then explain to your English-speaking friends that that's how it's pronounced in Japan even though Nikon marketing doesn't even use that pronunciation in English-speaking countries?
Do you correctly pronounce "champagne" the French way around your English-speaking friends, even though the French pronunciation sounds almost nothing like "sham pain" so of course you have to explain yourself every single time you say the word?
Does actual phlegm emerge from your throat whenever you correctly pronounce the Greek letter chi at the end of TeX and LaTeX, or do you just say "lay tech" or (god forbid) "lay techs"?
Most importantly, do you say "guh noo slash lin ucks" and go around correcting everyone who doesn't? Because if you do any of these things, please, please, please stop. Please. Please. Seriously, it is so not worth it.
I would love to say all of those words correctly if someone taught me the correct way.
Example: Recently visited France. Learned "framboise" ends with 'z' where as lots of English speaking people some how think the correct French pronunciation is fram-buwa. It's not it's fram-buawz
If someone says Bay-Nay-Nay for Banana or Hey-Ker Neh-wass for Hacker News I'd expect people would correct them. There's a reason we correct people's pronunciations. If we didn't they'd eventually stop being able to communicate. You might have been able to excuse it when it was harder to communicate world wide. now you can talk to at least 1/2 the world from your pocket. No more excuses.
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.
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.
While you didn't say so explicitly, you sound disparaging of this initiative in favour of Scratch being better in every way.
Scratch is great and noble and better in every way as an isolated programming learning tool, but it's worth noting the reach and marketability of Pocky to get kids interested in the whole scene.
You (parents, kids, non-CS-oriented teachers and mentors) aren't going to find and use Scratch without the prime directive of "I want a kid-friendly programming learning tool".
But now you can get the kids Pocky, which you may have gotten anyway since no kid is going to complain about that, and they can learn something meaningful and cool with a character that has context they know and appreciate, unlike scratch's characters that exist in their bubble. Actually being able to impact a much larger audience even with a less ideal experience, is net worth much more than a stellar tool that cannot break past a high activation barrier and caters to a very tiny audience. Like Settlers of Catan for introducing people to board games outside Monopoly, and IFLS (I Fucking Love Science) for getting people interested in space, biology, etc. These seem like perverted contractions of beautiful things, but at the end of the day they get more people interested and that's a good thing.
I for one remember countless mornings reading and learning the backs of the cereal boxes as I had breakfast getting ready for school, and those mornings would have been so much more productive building Pocky programs, but there was no way I was going to fire up Scratch and create programs there.
I was one of those kids who stayed glued to a computer indoors and had all my friends online. Now I have a career and friends across the globe to thank for it. Not every person should follow a prescribed path.
How often do you socially interact with those global friends, in person? I'm all for learning awesome computer skills, but there is a time to be a child, and a time to be an adult. I wouldn't exchange growing up in the woods with BMX bikes, skateboards, and vine swings with the neighborhood kids. For sitting behind a computer all summer vacation, messaging people on the internet. I now have a career, and friends all over the world as well.
In person? That's difficult for me since I'm not often able to travel to Finland, the UK, Egypt, etc. I interact with my online friends nearly daily, online. My point was that I would of never have met such diverse people early on had I not grown up around a computer + Internet. Nor would I have necessarily been able to get a job programming right out of high school that helped pay for my college education. I'm not claiming my path was superior in any way, only that there's more than one way through life.
Of course you would have, just like the rest of us have friends all over the world now. I respect your decisions, and I'm glad you're doing well however I'm not going to agree spending your youth indoors was a good choice. There is no argument for what this type of lifestyle is doing to this current generation. They are basically incapable of socially interacting and dating.
> There is no argument for what this type of lifestyle is doing to this current generation. They are basically incapable of socially interacting and dating.
I'm not downvoting you, but it seems this comes off as a sweeping generalization without any support. If you could at least back up your point with some basis for your statement (ie a reference to something), it would probably help to clarify what you're talking about.
65 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadThey could base it on PostScript, so it had nice graphics.
I am going to look for one of these packs though :-)
Hours spent coding should be followed or broken up by physical activity, not sugary treats.
That would be a lot healthier than a high fructose visual programming language like Pocky.
Yeah, we should force kids to go run laps around the block every time they complete a few dozen lines, or master a new concept. That'll motivate them to learn!
Instead of being caustic why don't you actually rebut my point?
We could/should do more to encourage kids to lead a healthy lifestyle and to balance hours sitting at the computer with sports or working out instead of eating unhealthy junk food.
Do you really think a company would run this campaign if they didn't think it would result in more kids buying pockys?
> Do you really think a company would run this campaign if they didn't think it would result in more kids buying pockys?
Well of course they run it to increase sales. That's a problem with advertising in general, not with this particular company or campaign idea. Or am I misunderstanding your criticism here?
> Hours spent coding should be (...) broken up by physical activity
Please don't. It's hard enough to find two or three hours of uninterrupted time as an adult. Kids and teenagers can pull off impressive feats of quick learning and skill acquisition in big part because they have long stretches of uninterrupted time. Don't take away the opportunity they have.
That said, I'm not saying one should not have a healthy lifestyle. Sure, encourage more physical activity. But for the love of Great Maker, do not break up the time kids spend on intellectual tasks or hobbies into small chunks. You can do fitness rituals in 15-minutes stretches, but you can't do anything that requires any kind of creativity or focus in that time.
I do my programming in chunk of twenty minutes at a time.
Complete focus, no distraction.
If you can just sit down at random times and immediately code for 20 minutes with full focus, please tell us your secret. It sounds like a superhuman skill.
Good breaks:
- I walk around the building
- Watch a short comedy youtube video
- Scroll through memes/comics
- Read blog posts, usually ones that aren't too detail-oriented and with good stopping points (Coding Horror is a good example)
- Listen to an instrumental music song (no lyrics), close my eyes, maybe get some fresh air.
Bad breaks:
- Start a long email
- Other projects.
- Anything mentally taxing or stressful (don't pay bills on break, don't try to figure out what you'll have for dinner)
- Read an exciting book that you don't want to put down
Doing this helps me stay focused all day. Over an 8 hour shift I take breaks for approx 48-80 minutes (plus lunch), so at most a little over an hour is wasted--versus burning out after just a few hours, writing bad code that I then spend the next day cleaning up.
This further translates into me being able to work some more on some side projects when I get home without getting burnt out--and not always programming, but other mental work like writing, art, meal planning, etc.
Your selfish act of keeping your own body healthy with literally dozens of minutes of pointless kilocalorie-burning and wasted watts every week is a Nash equilibrium choice. Think of all the benefits to society that could be realized if no one ever needed to exercise to stay healthy. But if you're healthy now, you have no particular incentive to cheat death. You're taking brains out of that innovation lottery.
Come on, people. We can automate people out of their paying jobs, but can't automate exercise out of existence?!
Perhaps there is a sort of cognitive dissonance in play. People who have remained healthy their entire lives by disciplined application of exercise would undoubtedly feel betrayed and devalued when people can achieve the same results with drugs and implants.
/s
Programming and doing exercise are not entirely rivalrous tasks, but I can get a lot done in 3 hours if I am completely focused and entirely uninterrupted (even from self-sourced interruptions).
https://i.imgur.com/KKc8qfU.jpg
As far as I recall, children can learn "Computational Thinking" without having to concentrate on the often heavy syntax of programming.
I agree with you that setting up candy on a table, to take a photo of it and then getting some game-character to move accordingly, sounds a bit far fetched and might not give enough to actually learn programming. But it could definitely work to some extent, and if nothing else it sounds like a great markething scheme.
Reminds me of Calvin eating boxes and boxes of "Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs" to get the flying beanie: https://chrisstich.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ca4.gif
Pocky is great.
This sounds pretty cool though.
Maybe we'll get Calorie Mate food blocks next. Programming with Calorie Mate could become a thing.
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.
Now someone into Minecraft should build something where you build with Legos, take a picture, and import into Minecraft.
I'm going to anal-retentively nitpick you and proclaim that Pocky was available in places like Yaohan (now defunct) [1] before Nijiya [2] even existed. ;)
[1] First US store in 1979 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaohan
[2] First store in 1986 http://www.nijiya.com/about-us
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gIrqQhwkM
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
Do you correctly pronounce "champagne" the French way around your English-speaking friends, even though the French pronunciation sounds almost nothing like "sham pain" so of course you have to explain yourself every single time you say the word?
Does actual phlegm emerge from your throat whenever you correctly pronounce the Greek letter chi at the end of TeX and LaTeX, or do you just say "lay tech" or (god forbid) "lay techs"?
Most importantly, do you say "guh noo slash lin ucks" and go around correcting everyone who doesn't? Because if you do any of these things, please, please, please stop. Please. Please. Seriously, it is so not worth it.
I thought it was "lah tech."
Example: Recently visited France. Learned "framboise" ends with 'z' where as lots of English speaking people some how think the correct French pronunciation is fram-buwa. It's not it's fram-buawz
http://forvo.com/word/framboise/
If someone says Bay-Nay-Nay for Banana or Hey-Ker Neh-wass for Hacker News I'd expect people would correct them. There's a reason we correct people's pronunciations. If we didn't they'd eventually stop being able to communicate. You might have been able to excuse it when it was harder to communicate world wide. now you can talk to at least 1/2 the world from your pocket. No more excuses.
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.
http://scratch.mit.edu
Scratch is great and noble and better in every way as an isolated programming learning tool, but it's worth noting the reach and marketability of Pocky to get kids interested in the whole scene.
You (parents, kids, non-CS-oriented teachers and mentors) aren't going to find and use Scratch without the prime directive of "I want a kid-friendly programming learning tool".
But now you can get the kids Pocky, which you may have gotten anyway since no kid is going to complain about that, and they can learn something meaningful and cool with a character that has context they know and appreciate, unlike scratch's characters that exist in their bubble. Actually being able to impact a much larger audience even with a less ideal experience, is net worth much more than a stellar tool that cannot break past a high activation barrier and caters to a very tiny audience. Like Settlers of Catan for introducing people to board games outside Monopoly, and IFLS (I Fucking Love Science) for getting people interested in space, biology, etc. These seem like perverted contractions of beautiful things, but at the end of the day they get more people interested and that's a good thing.
I for one remember countless mornings reading and learning the backs of the cereal boxes as I had breakfast getting ready for school, and those mornings would have been so much more productive building Pocky programs, but there was no way I was going to fire up Scratch and create programs there.
I'm not downvoting you, but it seems this comes off as a sweeping generalization without any support. If you could at least back up your point with some basis for your statement (ie a reference to something), it would probably help to clarify what you're talking about.