Any interest in learning to #code from the #Blind community on an old-school platform?

a MOO is a text-based virtual world. if you ever played an old interactive fiction or text adventure game you'll be familiar with the idea. you type in commands like "go north" to move, "put coin in box", "kill dragon with sword" and so forth, and you get written responses unfolding the story.

This type of interface was taken online with a MOO in the 1990's, and rather than a playable story, you can join in and work with other people in an interactive, virtual world.

More than that, as well as just playing, MOO has a rich and beginner-friendly programming language, so you can create objects and code them to do things to your own specifications.

through a series of structured lessons with code samples and plenty of explanation you'll learn some of the basics of any programming language, all whilst having fun and playing about. The world is always open and you can build as many rooms and items as you like. You can practice your written English, socialising and programming all at once, in a 100% text-based environment perfect for screen readers and Braille displays.

This will be my twenty-seventh empty MOO. Each one has gone off in a different direction with between 1 and 15 participants, mostly young visually-impaired school-children and teens needing an introduction to programming in a fun way when the UK introduced coding as part of our national curriculum.
I taught high school computing and college for a decade, and I'm wanting to open this opportunity up to more blind and visually-impaired people because coding is fun, and a MOO is a fun thing to play with.
it's Only worthwhile if we have the numbers though, so if you're not interested please pass on if you can.

forms.gle/LkKhqsbYXh6ondQz8

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in reply to Jayson Smith

@jaybird110127 that's pretty cool.
I get a bit sad when the kids all move on every time, so thought I'd see if there's an appetite for doing it more broadly. I have one more teaching session for some early teens this summer then, because I no longer work in education, that's all I have booked in.

I started with just lambda but prefer toast now, not so much for the server improvements but because those with the inclination can easily set up their own server and carry on with it when they're done with me.

in reply to Sean Randall

I have no idea how far along this is and how much of it actually works properly, but have you seen Moor, a MOO reimplementation in Rust? If not, github.com/rdaum/moor
in reply to Jayson Smith

@jaybird110127 I bulk out the first room so there's a couple of walkable places, which gets across the concept of typing commands. They learn to say, examine, get, drop and cardinarl directions there.
The last place they can walk to is a pickup point for a vehicle of some sort which travels between that public area and a single room owned by each player. so they board or enter the bus, or train, or climb on the dragon's back, or whatever it might be, and exit at their own individual stop to start building.
Player creation has hither to been closed and I just set them up manually with the appropriate permissions.
in reply to Andy

@remixman LOL I was just remembering the programmer bit application process we had on HumanityMOO. I actually coded that myself if I recall correctly. It asks a bunch of open-ended questions, then sends the results to a special mailing list. Anyway I was testing it out, I think with a dummy account so my application would actually be sent just so the other wizards could laugh at it. One of the questions was something like, "You want to check the value of a property. How would you do this?" and I responded, "Call a realtor."
@Andy
in reply to Ariaflame

@ariaflame the thing that seemed to appeal from MOO with children was the ... handoverability of things.
Child 1 would code something fun, then literally "give" it to his friend to play with.
The curriculum requirements aren't overly complicated, which helped. A basic idea of object oriented code with parent and child relationships, some simple conditional and iterative concepts and data types and code execution in a task system were about as far as most of them wanted to go.
in reply to Sean Randall

Interesting! I have a fair bit of programming experience (mostly Haskell these days), but I don't recall having ever heard of MOOs.

However, it does chime with something I've been pondering for a while: What if there was a programming language with a structure editor (like Lamdu has), so that you can't make syntax errors, but which is designed from the start to have simple text (or arrow key, etc.) input, and simple text output for each command? Instead of visually presenting lots of information at once, this would make it friendlier to screen readers and refreshable Braille displays.