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.
reshared this
Jayson Smith
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Sean Randall
in reply to Jayson Smith • • •@jaybird110127 mwahahaha. I like that.
Honestly, for capturing the basics the kids need up to their GED level it's been great fun.
Jayson Smith
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Sean Randall
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.
Jayson Smith
in reply to Sean Randall • • •GitHub - rdaum/moor: A system for building shared, programmable, online spaces. Compatible with LambdaMOO.
GitHubSean Randall
in reply to Jayson Smith • • •Jayson Smith
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Sean Randall
in reply to Jayson Smith • • •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.
Andy
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Jayson Smith
in reply to Andy • • •Sean Randall
in reply to Jayson Smith • • •We don't have realters in Britain. I thought the title of the Piers Anthony novel 'Realty check' had a typo when I first encountered it.
Sean Randall
in reply to Jayson Smith • • •Andy
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Sean Randall
in reply to Andy • • •Andy
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Sean Randall
in reply to Andy • • •Jayson Smith
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Ariaflame
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Sean Randall
in reply to Ariaflame • • •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.
Ariaflame
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Ariaflame
in reply to Sean Randall • • •Sean Randall
in reply to Ariaflame • • •@ariaflame lots of good stuff to look back on.
I could never get my head around room names as exits in a MUSH. Years of using cardinal directions have clearly warped my brain.
Tim Makarios
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.
Lady Artemis
in reply to Sean Randall • • •OMG I love this!!
I love it!! It is so much so much joy for me!
Thank you thank you 🤗
Sean Randall
in reply to Lady Artemis • • •