Presumably aimed at children, NHK World’s Texico program teaches the main ideas about programming without actually using a computer. Instead, it uses items like a toy train, playing cards, and other gadgets to teach concepts such as analysis, combination, simulation, abstraction, and more.
There are ten episodes in English and French. Some of them are more about critical thinking, which, admittedly, is important for solving problems in general with or without a computer. For example, a “magic” trick relies on the observation that tearing a sheet of paper into nine rectangular pieces will mean each piece has at least one perfectly straight edge except for the center piece.
The videos are short and light-hearted. We’d like to see a set of companion videos or posts that relate the lessons to some actual programming task. Of course, you could produce that yourself and host it on a platform like Hackaday.io or YouTube.
The episodes show programming algorithms in strange places. For example, in one episode, mail sorting is the algorithm segment. In another, it is how they pack fireworks.
If you try these with a kid, let us know how it goes. If you figure out why it is called Texico (テキシコ), let us know that, too. We’ve done our own computerless robot training. If you want to stick with hardware, there’s always the egg drop.
Texico is very close to how “critical thinking” (的思考) is pronounced in Japanese, and the concept of the show is to teach you how to think like a programmer.
I’ve been a fan of NHK’s Design and Technology educational shows for a while now. If you enjoy this you might also enjoy Pythagoras Switch ピタゴラスイッチ and Design Ah! デザインあ to name a couple. Also trotting along the globe, Tim Hunkin’s Secret Life of Machines and The Curiosity Show might give some tinkerers, young and old a couple ideas or two.
In france we have “Code en Bois” (Code in Wood), which is kind of Scrath but with wooden blocks:
https://codeenbois.forge.apps.education.fr/
thank you, great tip
This is a powerful concept, I can only grasp C++ OOP if I use a physical train car analogy and draw each step as a diagram. It works beautifully since most people given the train abstraction can get closer to a correct solution than just memorizing lines of code.
Who is memorizing lines of code? That’s literally the hard drive’s job.
NHK is what TV should have been, at least, here in the USA.
So, if the Joker comes up I’ve been hacked?
“Only if the wind blows it off the table”
No, that’s bit rot
When I saw the headline, I thought it was going to be something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDR_paper_computer