It’s like sitting a kid down at the ORIC-1. Kids are naturally curious. They love blank slates: a sandbox, a bag of LEGOs. Once you show them a little of what the machine can do they’ll clamor for more. They’ll want to know how to make that circle a little smaller or how to make that song go a little faster. They’ll imagine a game in their head and then relentlessly fight to build it. Along the way, of course, they’ll start to pick up all the concepts you wanted to teach them in the first place. And those concepts will stick because they learned them not in a vacuum, but in the service of a problem they were itching to solve. Project Euler, named for the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, is popular (more than 150,000 users have submitted 2,630,835 solutions) precisely because Colin Hughes – and later, a team of eight or nine hand-picked helpers – crafted problems that lots of people get the itch to solve. And it’s an effective teacher because those problems are arranged like the programs in the ORIC-1’s manual, in what Hughes calls an “inductive chain”: The problems range in difficulty and for many the experience is inductive chain learning. That is, by solving one problem it will expose you to a new concept that allows you to undertake a previously inaccessible problem. So the determined participant will slowly but surely work his/her way through every problem. This is an idea that’s long been familiar to video game designers, who know that players have the most fun when they’re pushed always to the edge of their ability. The trick is to craft a ladder of increasingly difficult levels, each one building on the last. New skills are introduced with an easier version of a challenge – a quick demonstration that’s hard to screw up – and certified with a harder version, the idea being to only let players move on when they’ve shown that they’re ready. The result is a gradual ratcheting up the learning curve. (via How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code – Technology – The Atlantic)