Thanks for asking I could give a better explanation. We mean the participant ships a project (like shipping code) and we physically ship them materials (like a drawing machine in the mail).
I spent the last year building Blot with teenagers in the Hack Club community including but not limited to B (age 19), Henry (15), Kai (17), Shawn (18), Hugo (15), Ella (19) and Bright (15).
At Hack Club we’re working on building a new model for public education through open source projects. We believe people learn best by building things they care about and sharing those things with others. We want to support motivated teenagers around the world to pursue technology this way. That’s why we created the “You Ship, We Ship” model. We build online creative coding environments that are gateways to other subjects in technology. When teenagers create projects with our tools and share them publicly we send them more creative material. At the end of 2022 we released our first “You Ship, We Ship” project: Sprig.
Sprig is a microworld for making tile games, when you share your game we send you the hardware to build a handheld gaming console that can play that game. https://github.com/hackclub/sprig
Today we are releasing our newest “You Ship, We Ship”: Blot. Create a program that generates line art and we’ll send you a robot that can draw that art in real life. We hope Blot will encourage people to explore the beauty of programming and be a gateway to digital fabrication. Nothing feels more magic to me than writing an incantation on a computer that can materialize into a real thing that you can hold in your hands. I hope to share that magic with you through Blot.
Everything is free and open source so anyone is welcome to use the editor, submit to the gallery, or build a Blot machine. You have to be a teenager for us to send you a machine for free though.
We built an editor for making simple (but complete and fun) games to help young folks (or anyone) learn to code.
It's at sprig.hackclub.com
If your son shares the game publicly as a PR we'll send him materials to build a console that can play it. We've had hundreds of kids around the world share games you can check out in the gallery.
Many people who in retrospect are truly innovative almost definitionally spend their time doing things other people don't regard as valuable (at first at least). As an extreme example of someone who prioritized a life of play look at Claude Shannon. He literally had a shop for building toys at home. I'm grateful he wasn't overly attracted to what others regarded as impactful at the time. That being said I still don't think it's important whether one's play becomes valued. I suspect in the long run we're all better off having people in the world who are passionate about what they are doing.
All of that might be true. All generalizations are sometimes untrue.
> spend their time doing things other people don't regard as valuable...
Sprig is an educational project, shepherded by adults affiliated with big name institutions like MIT and Google. They are extremely conventionally successful smart people who think "nurturing programming talent" is valuable. What are we even talking about? These things don't happen in a vacuum.
As others pointed out when fully assembled most of the board is covered (but visible). We designed the board to function like a devkit for the pico as well so unused pins are broken out on pads.
