rails symphonies

why (yes as in a name) is very famous in the Ruby community, especially for his unique programming book on learning Ruby, Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. It’s unique as it doesn’t take a traditional approach in teaching programming, but instead uses comics, with bizarre characters, and a more “fun” technique.

In the past few weeks why released Hackety Hack, with the goal to teach programming. Even with only 7 lessons, people seem happy with it.

Hackety Hack reminds me of BlueJ as a teaching tool. In Monash University we use BlueJ to do Java programming, except BlueJ isn’t illustrated with comic characters. It’s a simple, straight forward ide, except it is really stripped down, and lacks many features. Hence simple. The simpleness is what is need to teach the concepts, and not bog down student’s with all these fancy buttons to possibly click. I think it was a good choice in teaching programming. The similarity only lies in its simplicity, a good, straight forward, easy to use, editor.

Hackety Hack Manifesto

The Hackety Hack Manifesto outlines the goals and intentions, and as a learning tool they seem good to me.

Installation

Note: Sadly it doesn’t work in Linux or Mac OSX yet, but it is under way. So for the moment we are stuck with Windows. Judging from the screenshots, they were taking in Windows Vista. Since I don’t have Vista, I’ll be using XP.
Installation in Windows took 5 clicks, and was very straight forward.

Installation Process:

The Result

Hackety Hack

Once I ran Hackety Hack, the first thing I noticed was the use of the Tango Desktop Project icons. So I quickly looked for any attribution to them. None. I’ve left a post on the Hackety Hack’s forum Talkety Talk, so we will see from there.

I ran through the “Learn Ruby interactively”, and when it came to typing in code, the application crashed when I attempted to enter the open parentheses “(“. So I couldn’t experiment further with it (remember it is still in BETA).

Sharing Code

You can also share your code you made online. Though I couldn’t code much with Hackety Hack, other’s (such as why himself) have already put stuff up.

Cheat Sheet

I like the inclusion of a cheat sheet, as it provides users with a quick reference to techniques they have previously learned.

Free and Open Source?

The big question. This question was asked on the forums, and should be put up on a FAQ or something. But the answer is yes.

Conclusions

I think this is a good way to get kids, and students interested in programming as it doesn’t take a technical approach to programming. Since it’s still in beta, it’s still buggy somewhat, but you can already see the polish in terms of artwork.

I’ve already signed up to the Hackety Hack mailing list, and will see what I can contribute in. Maybe porting the application to GNU/Linux. Or something, we’ll see.

On a side note I’d love to experiment using this application in teaching environments.

Footnote:
The Hackety Hack icon is taken from the Hackety Hack site, and is licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution 3.0 license.