I think this is an interesting approach. You are visually modelling program FLOW - something that is hard to visualize by just looking at text.
I went to Virginia Tech and since the CS department was sucked into the rest of engineering - I ended up taking intro engineering courses (read: a complete waste of time) and they wanted to teach programming to freshman engineers through Alice.
Alice, although the early versions crashed, ran slow, and often saved the XML 'world' files incorrectly, corrupting your work and making you lose it - it did a great job of teaching visual programming because you could easily create a 3D scene or game without much effort, plus it highlighted the code as it ran.
While Wizbang is visual as well (albeit in a different way), the program flow diagrams kind of look like UML diagrams and could STILL scare away novice programmers.
A main issue of teaching programming to new comers is you need to start with the basics - but printing "hello world" to the screen doesn't seem applicable so it feels like they are wasting their time. Besides, most of what they use computers for is pretty and visual.
Wizbang doesn't seem to offer anything else that other learning tools don't do in a better way - except maybe the export to a "real" language.
Now imagine if you could combine that exporting functionality on top of something more visually interesting like Alice. Make a 'game' in Wizlice (Wizbang-Alice), and then export that code (on top of your minimal graphics libraries or functions to support what they write) to C++/Java and let them tinker around with THAT... they'll be on HN in a couple of years tops.
You are visually modelling program FLOW - something that is hard to visualize by just looking at text.
Visualizing the exchange of messages in object systems is just as hard. I think that that is a big impediment to teaching OO. Perhaps that's a bit more advanced than what this project is after.
I went to Virginia Tech and since the CS department was sucked into the rest of engineering - I ended up taking intro engineering courses (read: a complete waste of time) and they wanted to teach programming to freshman engineers through Alice.
Alice, although the early versions crashed, ran slow, and often saved the XML 'world' files incorrectly, corrupting your work and making you lose it - it did a great job of teaching visual programming because you could easily create a 3D scene or game without much effort, plus it highlighted the code as it ran.
While Wizbang is visual as well (albeit in a different way), the program flow diagrams kind of look like UML diagrams and could STILL scare away novice programmers.
A main issue of teaching programming to new comers is you need to start with the basics - but printing "hello world" to the screen doesn't seem applicable so it feels like they are wasting their time. Besides, most of what they use computers for is pretty and visual.
Wizbang doesn't seem to offer anything else that other learning tools don't do in a better way - except maybe the export to a "real" language.
Now imagine if you could combine that exporting functionality on top of something more visually interesting like Alice. Make a 'game' in Wizlice (Wizbang-Alice), and then export that code (on top of your minimal graphics libraries or functions to support what they write) to C++/Java and let them tinker around with THAT... they'll be on HN in a couple of years tops.
Cool idea, polished effort, please expand visual component!