When I saw what the challenge was, my first thought was "why would I want to learn about baby-talk to implement this?" I can't use that knowledge anywhere else. I had a very strong negative reaction to combining baby-talk with what I thought was a professional skill challenge that I'm still unpacking. I couldn't possibly discuss baby-talk with the young people on the team I'm leading. I'm an old woman and it would be creepy.

I understand that it is not easy to invent a coding challenge that hasn't already been done. This is my advice for the next challenge:

• Significantly reduce the scope and make the challenge easier to judge by having some determinate behavior. If I give the same input to all the entries, all of the valid ones will have some minimum output that unequivocally demonstrates they were successful at the challenge.
• Choose a topic that doesn't involve children.
• Don't try to anticipate how people will be creative with the challenge-this is a prototype. It would be better to be too simple than too complicated.

I expected something like "decrypting" a secret message, or something involving flocking/self-organizing behavior etc. Some topic which might have something useful to learn even if the actual prompt was playful.

Searching for baby talk translators online yields some AI-driven results but not much else.

That makes this a bad prompt, not a good one. Hardly anyone is interested enough in baby-talk to do anything worthwhile around it software-wise.

When I saw what the challenge was, my first thought was "why would I want to learn about baby-talk to implement this?" I can't use that knowledge anywhere else. I had a very strong negative reaction to combining baby-talk with what I thought was a professional skill challenge that I'm still unpacking. I couldn't possibly discuss baby-talk with the young people on the team I'm leading. I'm an old woman and it would be creepy.

I expected something like "decrypting" a secret message, or something involving flocking/self-organizing behavior or some other technical topic that you could just scratch the surface of or dig into. I would like to see a topic which might have something useful to learn even if the actual prompt was playful. Genetic algorithms. Huffman encoding. Graph transversal. Give participants something to chew on.

I understand that it is not easy to invent a coding challenge that hasn't already been done. This is my advice for the next challenge:

• Significantly reduce the scope and make the challenge easier to judge by having some determinate behavior. If I give the same input to all the entries, all of the valid ones will have some minimum output that unequivocally demonstrates they were successful at the challenge.
• Choose a topic that doesn't involve children.
• Don't try to anticipate how people will be creative with the challenge-this is a prototype. It would be better to be too simple than too complicated. It should have a part that anyone can accomplish and enough room to let people showcase their creativity.

Searching for baby talk translators online yields some AI-driven results but not much else.

That makes this a bad prompt, not a good one. Hardly anyone is interested enough in baby-talk to do anything worthwhile around it software-wise. Just because something has been done before doesn't mean there is no room to do something creative with it.