"I love Hackworth — making programming relevant to children"

2022-09-14 21:00:08

hackworth : About We're hiring! Contact Hackworth is a software development company whose purpose is to make programming relevant to children. We're bringing programming to domains with wide appeal, instead of just the usual computing applications. Our tools are designed for learners, not professionals, so rather than performance and general-purpose applicability, we optimize for pedagogy and suitability to task. Our first product is Primer, an integrated programming environment designed for learning functional programming and fundamental computational concepts, such as functions, types, variables, and processes. Primer is intended for use in classrooms and other instructor-led environments. It will be available in Q1 2023. If you're interested in testing Primer in your classroom or school, or if you're an educator and you'd like to know more about Primer, please get in touch. Our principles Equal access & opportunity Pre-university schools and volunteer-driven organizations have made wonderful progress towards the goal of increasing diversity in computing, but there's a long way to go. For example, young women and people of colour still comprise a small percentage of primary and secondary school students who choose to take computing-related subjects, particularly computer science. At Hackworth, we believe that increasing diversity in computing starts with broadening its appeal to children. Code.org [US], 2019. Code.org [US], 2018. Roehampton [England], 2017. Royal Society [UK], 2017. Relevance is important Studies show that students in introductory programming classes are more likely to stick with it when they understand programming's relevance to their personal interests, career goals, and to society in general, but programming is typically only used in computing subjects. Children who aren't interested in computing for computing's sake may not have an opportunity to discover how useful programming can be in other disciplines. Hackworth are exploring novel ways to apply programming to children's broader interests, from playing games to more serious issues such as climate change and environmental justice. Guzdial, ICER '13. Barker et al, FIE '14. Sax et al, Soc. Sci. 2018. Optimize for learning Most programming languages are designed for industrial use. These languages are optimized to solve problems that have nothing to do with the difficulties of learning to program, and their complexity is often at odds with pedagogy. Languages designed for learning typically offer affordances such as informative error messages or block-based programming, but even these languages usually lack an effective means for understanding how programs are executed, which is helpful for developing a mental model of computation — understanding how a computer computes. Hackworth are building on the work of existing learning languages by creating tools that help children visualize and reason about computational processes and the programs that generate them. Findler et al, JFP 2002. Pyret.org, 2020. Brennan et al, AERA 2012. Wrenn et al, Onward!'2017. Victor, 2012. Sorva, ACM Transactions on Computing Eduction, 2013. Tung et al, IJHCS 2001. The Hackworth Ltd logo The lowercase letter "h" followed by ":" Company About Jobs Contact Resources Security Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms of use Elsewhere GitHub Twitter © Hackworth Ltd