Only 5% of the US population is capable enough to "schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages."
Remember in the 90s, when teens were more tech savvy than adults, and everyone assumed that the savviest would just keep getting younger? Now it's 2017, and the people who were teens in the 90s are the most tech savvy generation and probably will be until they die.
Kids don't grow up with computers any more, they grow up with iPhones. If it's possible to learn to code on an iPhone, it's despite Apple's best efforts.
@mogwai_poet I just started playing around with Pico-8 and it reminded me so much of playing around on an Apple ][ only even cooler - I have to believe there are kids out there who will be inspired by access to tools like that! https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
@rafial Yeah I really like Pico-8 and I'm curious how good it is as a didactic tool
@mogwai_poet @rafial This is a good tip! When my eldest was small the best experience giving him programming skills I had was actually dusting off a Spectrum 48K and going through some BASIC with him.
The layers of abstraction in modern programming get in the way. I assume they're peeled away in PICO-8?
@insom I meant to put "hardware" in scare quotes when talking about direct access :P You are working with an emulated imaginary machine, not the real hardware on which it is hosted.
@insom precisely! Start it up, start typing in draw commands at the command line and see immediate feedback. It provides a simple, intentionally limited machine model with direct access to the hardware. The language is Lua, but it's still as approachable as BASIC was.