The author's interest in middle-grade books is fascinating. I'd love to read a post of recommendations with accompanying rationale, if only to get ideas for books my daughter might like!
The Crew (2019). Approachable but interesting co-op trick taking with communication restrictions and 50 missions for replayability. If you liked Hanabi, you might end up spending more time on this.
> My first response when the plan to add generics was announced was “meh”. In my 5+ years working in Go, I can probably count on one hand the number of times that I felt like I really needed generics. Most of the code I write in my day job is very specific to the domain and doesn’t fit the use case that generics aim to fill.
to
> I love that I was able to delete 95% of my code because of generics.
Given your interest in hiring art and theatre professionals to support education I think you'll love The Diamond Age. It's so relevant to what you're doing I'd assumed you must have already read it!
I'm definitely coming at this from my own parent perspective and my some of feedback is probably more a reaction to the realities of classroom instruction than about Litnerd specifically.
I'm going to push on your deflection to legal obstacles to sharing footage though. Get parent permission and make a better example video! :)
I'm a parent that just taught my 4yo preschooler to read. So I'm not really your target user, but I watched the walkthrough and read the website, and here are my reactions. Hopefully something here is useful for you:
- I'm honestly baffled by spending so much time on one book (program?) in a classroom context. I imagine some kids won't be interested in the particular story, but it will go on for an entire month. I could see this damaging interest.
- The pace seems incredibly slow. To learn to read, you need to read a lot. But this is one book per month?
- The more stories a child is exposed to, the more chances there are to encounter something especially captivating for that child, and to spark an interest.
- It's hard to believe how much participation there will be without seeing an example class and interactions between the students & actor. The videos on the site make it seem like a completely passive experience.
- Craft activities seem like a distraction from reading unless the activities are grounded in literacy (e.g. letter/word games or creations). Even then I'm kind of skeptical.
- I predict you'll end up changing the name "litnerd". Being a nerd is cool on HN, but elsewhere?
All that said, I'm a fan of your mission and understand that learning to read in a classroom is going to look a lot different than learning 1:1. But I wonder if you could leave the group instruction to teachers and go direct to kids with a more Duolingo ABC-like experience, but include live instructors/actors. It'd be sort of like reading with a remote parent. Instructors could act out the story as you're doing with litnerd, but also unstick kids with reading help and mini-lessons. Basically, build a literacy-specific Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from A Diamond Age with gig economy ractors.
Tern GSD cargo ebike. This thing is the bike version of a minivan. Biking the kids to preschool every day is so much more healthy and fun than taking the car. We also visit a much bigger variety of parks on the weekend now.
I've played a lot Beat Saber, and ended up getting wrist weights. Very recently I've been spending time in Thrill of the Fight. I would never have expected myself to like it, but it's a fun workout.
I'm constantly invoking this principle, but I have a small tweak: combine it with the (now anachronistically named) Python Paradox to get "use a tool from your toolbox".
Restricting the number of different technologies in your toolbox gets you most of the benefits described in TFA. But contrary to "boring", it's actually preferable for some of those tools to be bleeding edge. That way you also get to enjoy the benefits of the Python Paradox.
Of course, you need to have good enough taste to pick new techs, and sometimes the bleeding edge will cut you. But because you amortize that cut over the whole org it doesn't hurt much.
I'm also interested in which apps klik99 recommends.
Here are the apps I've whitelisted on my 3 year old's iPad. I don't like having video on there because I found passive video consumption dominates all other activities. I've found with a hand-picked set of apps, she naturally self-limits her screen time.
- Khan Academy Kids. A pretty large library of educational content that nevertheless is engaging enough to compete with the other apps she has access to. Does have a few videos though. https://www.khanacademy.org/kids