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Did Google and the Hour of Code Get "Left" and "Right" Wrong?
theodp writes: Command the dancers to "point left" in Google's dance-themed Code Boogie learn-to-code tutorial on the Santa Tracker website, and the dancers actually point to their own right. The lesson seems to reinforce a common mistake made by younger children learning to code in LOGO, which is to use their own or the display screen's frame of reference rather than the turtle's frame of reference. "These misconceptions," explained Richard E. Mayer, "may be due to the knowledge that the child brings with him or her to the programming environment. For example, children who possess an egocentric conception of space (Piaget & Inhelder, 1956) would fail to recognize that when the turtle is at a 180-degree orientation, its right corresponds to the child's left." So, it should probably be asked if the learn-to-code tutorials from Lucasfilm, Code.org, and Google that are being used to teach the world's K-12 schoolchildren to code might be making the same mistake as 4-7 year-olds. In this year's flagship flagship Lucasfilm/Code.org Star Wars Hour of Code tutorial, for example, command the droid BB-8 to move left and it could move to either its own left or right depending on what direction it's pointed in. So, did the "Largest Learning Event in History" also get "left" and "right" wrong?
They are not 'making a mistake.' In this case, left and right are ambiguous. It is why is real situations like this (eg a director telling a dancer which way to point) the terms 'stage left' or 'house left' would be used. Or at the very least, 'your left' or 'my left'.
Port and starboard are no less ambiguous in this situation.m Are you looking in the direction of the front of the ship, or is the dancer? Stage left is the proper way to say it.
Obviously you do not know what Port and Starboard mean... by definition they are unambiguous.
They are indeed unambiguous, but no more so than left and right.
If someone stands in front of you facing you as you walk towards them says "turn left", it means in your frame. Not theirs.
If someone on a boat ahead of you as you sail towards them says "turn port", it means in your boat's frame. Not theirs.
In either case, there's no ambiguity. The size of the frame of reference is larger for port/starboard, but it's still a non-fixed frame of reference. Ambiguity is avoided by always using the frame of reference of the recipient at the time the message is received, not your own.
It's like driving an RC car. If you tell it to turn left, it's the RC car's left. Always. Anyone who don't intuitively understand that has a mental deficiency or doesn't match the 3+ age requirement.
Port and starboard are explicitly referenced to the object's "forward", i.e. object's left and object's right respectively. So in this case port is the turtle's left no matter which way they face. That's why they use it on boats and planes and things where some might be facing backwards.
(By the way, if you need help remembering colors and orientations, port wine is red - and port has the same number of letters as left. Starboard is right and green.)
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.