Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42495637

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

This has resulted in the development of a model called "you ship, we ship." We build open source creative coding environments, and when teenagers share the projects they make with these tools, we send them materials to dive deeper into the subject and related technologies. Our approach is predicated on the constructionist idea that people learn best by building things they care about and sharing them with others. The vision we have is to create a public collection of creative learning tools that offer people projects they can do right away and communities of practice to engage with.

Blot is our next installment in the series. It's designed to be a gateway to CNC robotics through digital art. If you'd like to see some of the projects people have made so far, you can check out:

https://blot.hackclub.com/gallery

You can also find projects from our first "you ship, we ship" called Sprig. It's a game console you get by building a game for it.

https://sprig.hackclub.com/gallery

I'd love people's thoughts on the model and ideas for other subjects in technology we could build projects around.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40180475

Points: 61

# Comments: 8

I spent the last year building Blot with teenagers in the Hack Club community including but not limited to B (age 19), Henry (15), Kai (17), Shawn (18), Hugo (15), Ella (19) and Bright (15).

At Hack Club we’re working on building a new model for public education through open source projects. We believe people learn best by building things they care about and sharing those things with others. We want to support motivated teenagers around the world to pursue technology this way. That’s why we created the “You Ship, We Ship” model. We build online creative coding environments that are gateways to other subjects in technology. When teenagers create projects with our tools and share them publicly we send them more creative material. At the end of 2022 we released our first “You Ship, We Ship” project: Sprig.

Sprig is a microworld for making tile games, when you share your game we send you the hardware to build a handheld gaming console that can play that game. https://github.com/hackclub/sprig

Today we are releasing our newest “You Ship, We Ship”: Blot. Create a program that generates line art and we’ll send you a robot that can draw that art in real life. We hope Blot will encourage people to explore the beauty of programming and be a gateway to digital fabrication. Nothing feels more magic to me than writing an incantation on a computer that can materialize into a real thing that you can hold in your hands. I hope to share that magic with you through Blot.

Everything is free and open source so anyone is welcome to use the editor, submit to the gallery, or build a Blot machine. You have to be a teenager for us to send you a machine for free though.

I’m excited to see what people make! Enjoy.

If you want to learn more about Hack Club you can check out this short documentary we made about our 2023 summer hackathon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1s5HqSqKi0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39979698

Points: 35

# Comments: 2

It's at sprig.hackclub.com

If your son shares the game publicly as a PR we'll send him materials to build a console that can play it. We've had hundreds of kids around the world share games you can check out in the gallery.

You could check out my bidirectional circuit design tool:

https://github.com/leomcelroy/svg-pcb

Paper on it here:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3559400.3562004

Feel free to reach out if you have questions.

I've been really impressed with how well people can build out really engaging games with simple graphics but interesting game mechanics. The community already has pushed it beyond what we originally expected when designing the engine.

More directly responding to your point Ivan Illich has some interesting commentary on the modern invention of childhood in Deschooling Society.