If you want to inspire a teenager to love music, should you give them a toy whistle or a grand piano? Whistles and pianos both have a low barrier to entry, but the piano accommodates skill growth, the whistle does not.
Many EdTech platforms today are walled gardens full of toy whistles marketed like pianos. Kids spend a few weeks learning a block language or a very limited library that only exists on that website. Once the course is over, that knowledge and everything they built, has no transfer value to the real world. Then it’s on to the next thing.
Evidently, Code-org and CodeHS view students’ computers as little more than a medium for automated formative assessment. For each tiny grain of knowledge doled out, their systems demand proof-of-learning regurgitation in return. They’re robbing students of time to chew on new ideas and apply knowledge in way that’s actually fulfilling.
This is the result of decades of chasing “standards”, some arbitrary measure of mediocrity, which has lowered expectations of what students can achieve. In turn, confidence and motivation has cratered.
A Decade of Rot
To sugarcoat this rotting core, EdTech companies often uses the aesthetics of games without the substance of play. They’re churning out glorified multiple choice tests with Disney and Minecraft branded turtle graphics. “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down!” But shouldn’t learning actually be fun, instead of something we trick students into enduring?
Code.org’s Game Lab from 2016… screenshot taken in 2026.
To be fair, 10-15 years ago when most of this creative coding curricula was made, simply having a computer in class was a pretty novel experience. Students and teachers were easy to please and willing to overlook flaws. But in my experience, after a short honeymoon period, today’s students can’t stand using these platforms. The gap between what they want to learn and the tools these platforms provide is massive.
So is the logical next step isolating students in AI personalized learning bubbles and forcing them to stay on task via LightSpeed and other AI spyware panopticon command centers?
Seymour Papert must be rolling in his grave!
Modern EdTech isn’t just uninspiring and increasingly dystopian, it neutralizes Papert’s vision for how the computer could revolutionize education.
What Made the Turtle So Good?
In the 1960s, Papert was using robots and computers that cost $100,000 to teach kids.
The turtle was cutting-edge!
At a time when most people only saw the computer’s potential as a “teaching machine”, for programming children, Papert championed the idea that children should program computers.
For Papert, the Turtle was supposed to be a servant to the child's whims. Learning to program could be a self-guided exercise in creative problem solving. If the child wanted to draw a star, they would freely experiment with the turtle to figure out the math required.
Neutering the Turtle
But modern EdTech curriculum takes programming, an intrinsically interesting and curiosity sparking activity, and wraps it in a system of artificial carrots and sticks, so the brain reclassifies it as labor.
Students stop asking, “What can I do with this?” and start asking, “What do I do to make green checkmarks appear?” By the time they reach the “Free Play” section at the end of a lesson, the psychological damage is done. The student has been conditioned to see the platform as a compliance engine. In their mind, “Free Play” isn’t a reward; it’s an optional extension of the labor they just finished.
Endless micro-testing makes students perceive errors a barrier to progress instead of a natural opportunity for real learning.
Papert believed students learn best when they are making something that actually has to work: not just to pass a test, but to function in the world. When students externalize their internal model of understanding, and it doesn’t hold up to the “Resistance of Reality”, they need to debug their thinking.
But after an hour of formative assessment, the prefrontal cortex is exhausted. Students aren’t willing to invent new problems to solve, they’re looking for the psychological relief of closure: hitting “Submit” and closing the computer.
Code-org and CodeHS basically say: "Here’s a vacuum. Use it to suck up these 50 specific crumbs in this specific order. Once the floor is 'Standard-Compliant,' you’re finally allowed to use the vacuum to play." But by then, the vacuum is a symbol of drudgery.
Protest
Five years ago, I got tired of teaching the same outdated lessons with p5.js on how to make a crappy version of Pong (1972)! 😂
Today’s kids aren’t excited by the prospect of recreating digital relics.
Even Papert’s Turtle wasn’t meant to be timeless.
I wanted my Intro to CS students to be able to make web games using modern, industry standard physics simulation. But none of the existing software for that was good enough.
So in 2021, I took it upon myself to develop p5play v3.
It wasn’t just a code library and interactive textbook, it was a protest!
Giving students real creative agency with cutting-edge tech doesn’t fit the typical EdTech business model, and they’re never going to do it if there’s no demand for it.
I’m trying to change that.
Are you excited for the future of CS education? Visit q5play-org
