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My 11-year-old has been having a great experience with visual scripting in @godotengine — building her most complex project yet, without worrying about typos or misspellings. However, since I often sit with her while she's programming, I have noticed some things that distract her https://twitter.com/_eons/status/1319268941181562880
She's structuring her project as one big script. That makes it challenging when you drag a new element from the side of the editor into the script & it ends up in a random place. It's usually hard to see because it's on top of earlier code. Searching for it breaks her flow
The next-biggest flow breaker is having to drag lines between nodes repeatedly to get them to connect. Often she has to stop what she's doing and zoom in to fix this problem
I think the automatic addition of nodes is often helpful to her (most common when she's recasting an int as a string) but the fact that the automatically-created nodes can end up far from where they were created leads to flow-breaking rearrangements
Also, because there aren't a lot of VisualScript code examples online, we end up searching (inside the editor) for the right next node. It would be great if that search could be improved, for example by also searching the descriptions of nodes (not just the names)
For example, yesterday she was trying to find a mod operator. We couldn’t find it by searching “mod” or “%” (even though "%" is in the description of "remainder")
Overall though, I'm really thankful that @godotengine exists, and that the team has taken the time to add visual scripting!
I've seen people online ask, "Who is visual scripting for?" One answer is, "My daughter."
She learned to program using visual languages, especially the @TeamKano tools (which she still loves)
She learned to program using visual languages, especially the @TeamKano tools (which she still loves)
Spelling and punctuation are things she's still learning in English — and when she's tried textual coding, she's found the requirements for consistent spelling and punctuation much worse flow breakers than anything noted in this thread
