So, #8bitmooc is an 8-bit MOOC.
##What is a MOOC? A MOOC is a Massively Open Online Course, a course open to anyone in the world for free to take, learn, interact, and enjoy. The most popular MOOCs right now are those offered by folks like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity, but there's no reason why we can't make our own MOOC right here in Github!!
That's exactly what I'm doing. Wanna help?
##What is #8bitmooc? The #8bitmooc is a MOOC that teaches students the endless joys of writing assembly code, specifically assembly code for the 6502 processor (the best one ever made). The idea is for the course to be accessible to programming newbies and pros alike.
When students learn most modern programming languages, they often learn them in the abstract. They can create methods, define variables, and do so much that they don't know where to start. Assembly, at the other extreme, is very concrete. You have exactly $10000 bytes to fit your program, sprites, and memory, and the instruction set is very small. You have to be able to reuse your code, or you'll run out of space. If you can make your program really small, get it. If you can actually make a game, you really get it.
Assembly programming is like a puzzle, since all of the pieces are laid out in a palette in front of you in your spec sheet. Subroutines aren't magic things handled by the computer. You do them yourself. The objective isn't teaching programming so much as it's about teaching computational thinking. That's more valuable anyway.
Besides, programming for 8-bit video game consoles is pretty wizard. Wanna help?
##What do we need? The todo list is as follows:
- We need a web platform (that's what this project is for)
- We need a textbook (we'll make that on a wiki)
- Exercises
- Some standard libraries for the 6502
- An epic logo (maybe get opengameart to help)
- Some sprites for students to use for games
(I'll make a sprite converter)
The web platform needs:
Open Badges (because badges are pro)An assembler and emulatorA wiki (for the textbook)- An autograder (a reference architecture 6502)
- To support a million students (our target goal!)
##Our Goal? A million students, a million satisfied customers, and ultimately, world domination.
##Wanna help?
- Follow the Devblog on http://8bitmooc.org
- Join the IRC Channel: #8bitmooc on Freenode
- Sign up here: http://8bitmooc.org/sign-up