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?

Comments

Stage Left

[sunderland56]

Welcome to the difference between "Left" and "Stage Left".

Another hatchling left behind

[Krishnoid]

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."

I'd argue that this is a failure in instruction. If s/he was told at the beginning that s/he *was* the turtle, perhaps with a couple code examples demonstrated in first-reptile view side-by-side with a top-level view, the child would probably get the idea right off the bat.