[IAEP] kids hacking sugar?

[forster at ozonline.com.au]

Soren

I hope a non-Sugar anecdote is OK.
I had a year 6 (aprox. 11year old) student in my class programming in a TurtleArt/Etoys/Scratch like drag and drop programming language with top end extensibility through a scripting language.
He found a strategy game with quite complex coding in the scripting language written by a Dutch programmer. All the variable names were in Dutch.
On his own initiative he passed the code through Google Translate Dutch->English to find out how to increase the range of his laser turrets.

For me this demonstrates that surprisingly young kids will do high end hacking if four conditions are met: relevant, authentic, low entry, high ceiling.

Relevant: something relevant to your interests, like a strategy game
Authentic: real world useful, like a game your classmates will play
Low entry: easy to start learning
High ceiling: unrestricted growth and challenge (see Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on flow)

TurtleArt on Sugar has Python function and Python block extensions as an attempt to provide an easy pathway from drag and drop programming to Python hacking. I don't know how successful this has been with kids. 

Getting straight into Python programming is 'high entry', any significant hacking I would expect to come from the TurtleArt/Scratch/Etoys pathway. 

Tony

> I'm a curious outsider. Do kids actually hack sugar, change codes, do
> language translation, etc?
> Or is it just an option that they have with Sugar-FOSS?
> If so, where can I find some data on kids involved with
> sugar-hacking-activity?
> i.e. videos, community-discussions, documents, or your own descriptive
> observations
> 
> 
> regards Soren
> student in educational anthropology