Teaching Kids to Program with Hedy: A Gradual Programming Language
summary
A teaching-focused language that uses gradual language levels (eventually a Python subset at level 22) is built, transpiles student code to Python, and parses using Lark so it runs in the browser with optional accounts and telemetry. It supports 17 languages, is open source, and claims almost 1.5 million Hedy programs created since 2020. Logged data shows about 25% of submissions have syntax errors (versus ~50–75% for novices in Python), and deployments are widely used in schools.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:31How to teach programming?
- 2:48Compilers are lovely teachers
- 7:15Compilers are not teachers
- 9:08The programmer's brain
- 11:49Rules gradually change
- 12:41Hedy is gradual
- 14:01Demo
- 17:53How is this going?
- 18:54Hedy programs
- 21:00Do kids like Hedy?
- 27:40Demo
- 29:26Architecture
- 33:45OS & academia
- 36:16Hedy is free & open source
- 37:23Outro
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