One of the hardest things to get beginners to internalize is a sense of motivation about what they are creating. In the past I’ve used memes and made it fun and mnemonically valuable, but I’m going to try something entirely different this year for the 2022 Boost. I’m going to do all the Go programming using useful Bonzai™ commands so that people start with something that is immediately practical and portable.
Creating Bonzai branch commands is very addicting — especially since you can collect branches of composable commands from others and add them to your own. This collector mentality — coupled with the fact that you can create collectable things yourself — is what I’m betting will drive these beginning Go developers to want to add more, crafting their Bonzai trees with the same motivation and intensity as one would a bonsai tree in real life.
Each project need not be huge, but it immediately makes FOSS contributors out of even the humblest beginner. So the next step is to identify (and design) a set of commands that will give a sufficient introduction to all the types and basic constructs of the Go language. Some of the commands will still be fun, like an animation command.
#golang #coding #education #boost