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I've dabbled in the programming language Alice and it's quite neat to see my seven year old manipulate things on the screen. I am just trying to get him exposed to a lot of different things, computers, reading, baseball, swimming, and look at enhancing the things he becomes passionate about - whether that's football or C# programming.
I can add to his base of knowledge by advising him, but ultimately, he'll need to climb the peaks and sustain the valleys.
That being said, I will tell him that if he ever wants to get laid, he should stay away from Linux.

This struck me as a really innovative idea. I admit that I haven't played any of the games in the article (except the Oregon Trail back in the first grade), but from the comments, it sounds like Civilization got quite a few people interested in history and world civilizations. Does anyone remember playing Number Munchers? That was a far more entertaining way to learn multiplication, factoring, and inequalities than a bunch of worksheets. That's the game I remember the most, but that wasn't the only game we played during class. There were others that became a part of our curriculum for weeks, about which and from which I don't remember a damn thing. Even Oregon Trail didn't seem all that instructional to me. I didn't have any better sense of the hardships of western explorers after having played it. All I really took away from the Oregon Trail was: it's easy (and fun!) to shoot wild animals, but it's hard to get all those animals into your wagon. And they spoil so quickly!

Selecting the appropriate game for each subject and age group seems to me like the most difficult part of this curriculum. For example, how much Mesopotamian culture are these kids really going to soak up while they develop their graphic novelization of "Gilgamesh?" I'll bet that the future engineers will become masters of the multimedia application they're supposed to use, and when you ask them to tell you about Gilgamesh, they'll say, "Check out how realistically I rendered his fall from the tower! And look at this bitchin' eagle I made that broke his fall!," (I've never read Gilgamesh; here is the brief description from which I constructed my example) followed by a lengthy explanation of how they got the whole thing to work despite numerous setbacks and frustrations with the multimedia program, and how, when they write their multimedia program, it will have fewer bugs, more features, and just generally be way better.

Sorry, just trying to score some Funny points.

One of the earlier comments talked about a role-playing game in which the children had to work their way through a post-apocalyptic scenario: pick a leader, decide whether to open the bomb shelter door. That seems like an excellent game. Hopefully such innovative "real-life" games won't be permanently shelved in favor of electronic or board games during any move towards a more game-centric style of teaching.

Back to selecting age-appropriate, subject-specific games. I don't know much about such games, but per my experience with Number Munchers, it seems like such games could be a real boon (it also seems weird, as an adult, to be talking about Number Munchers as an excellent, age-appropriate mathematics game, instead of talking about how cool the game is and how far into the game I can get relative to my peers, as I did when I was in grade school). For example, Alice seems like an excellent teaching tool by which to introduce more kids to programming. And maybe Civiilization, or a game like it, can help drive home history material. At least initially, though, selecting the right game seems like the most difficult part of this approach (harder still: how do you determine whether it WAS the right game? How do you gauge effectiveness?). I do, however, applaud the attempt to try something novel, and despite having read and having had my initial enthusiasm tempered by the critics of this approach who have posted already, I admit that I am optimistic about the outcome.

http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=what_is_alice/what_is_alice

"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course."

kulakovich

http://www.alice.org/

I've seen a few places that teach students alice in order for them to become familiar with looping and conditional constructs before they move to something else. I think with all the visual stuff going on it would appeal more to younger programmers.

It seems like Alice, except on a console [ http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=downloads/download_alice ]. I suppose if you want to teach to kids though, you have to show them something cool, which is where Kodu succeeds. Kids like to be cool, and making it look cool helps. Also, it looks like it can be a bit of fun on the xbox.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this, so this isn't an endorsement, but...

Have you considered taking a look at Alice? It's the free system worked on by the late Randy Pausch to teach programming without jumping straight into coding. From the site:

Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games...By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

You ever see Alice? http://www.alice.org/ Not a language per say, but it teaches you the structure of programming, and you can look in at the code to see what it is doing behind the gui. We used it in a beginners class in SRU once, thought it was kinda neat.

There's always Alice 3D programming environment.

The basic concepts of programming wrapped in a 3D animated simulation.

It's cross-platform and free too.

If you want to increase the depth at which students engage the programming environments and paradigms, you may want to try Storytelling Alice over standard Alice. http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/

However, it's not compatible with Alice2 and you'd have to develop a curriculum for it from scratch.

When I used to teach a technology class for a local catholic grade school. I found a great program that was developed by the folks at Carnagie Mellon. It's called Alice. The kids find it quite engaging, And its free. Now it has changed a little since I first used it about 7 years ago, but check it out. It may be worth looking into. go to: http://www.alice.org/ Hope this helps.

Alice and StoryTelling Alice
"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience."
Thank you Randy Pauch. We miss you.

Or try
Myro using Microsoft Robotics Studio

or Pyro which was the non-MS precursor to Myro... program bots in Python with either real bots or simulation.

Either way, the graphical environments and real bots give kids a great way to SEE and TOUCH their results, which is more how they learn. You can cover all the important software constructs (variables, loops, events, data structs, etc) and avoid some of the abstract conceptualization required in more conventional languages/applications. They will learn the concepts through doing & using them. Then once they are hooked, they can dig into other languages.

Works great for middle school & college kids.... Pyro's got years of track record teaching intro to AI - to liberal arts majors!

I would suggest Alice http://www.alice.org/. It is a drag and drop interface to a 3D environment. It is FREE and was designed at Carnegie Melon University. I teach high school sciene and have almost zero programming background. I learned the basics in two weeks at a summer workshop at Duke University. The last week of the workshop was a summer camp for middle school aged children. They picked it up easily, enjoyed making worlds, and learned quite a bit about basic programming. Once they learn it, they can easily start exploring languages like Java.

I (and others) wrote a good wikipedia page on this topic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_programming_language . I'd look at this list

I personally love and can recommend Alice http://www.alice.org/ and had a great deal of success with my daughter with this.

It wouldn't start with any specific languages, but using Alice and its younger cousin Storytelling Alice might provide a good intro to concepts.

I would judge how quickly those concepts are being integrated and then move on to an easy-ish language like BASIC.

It wouldn't start with any specific languages, but using Alice and its younger cousin Storytelling Alice might provide a good intro to concepts.

I would judge how quickly those concepts are being integrated and then move on to an easy-ish language like BASIC.

Alice by Randy Pausch of the Last Lecture

That's more like what I was looking for. have you shown you son Alice? http://www.alice.org/

If you're going to go this route, Alice is probably a better choice, since it was basically designed as a tool to teach programming with 3D graphics.

As opposed to Blender, which well, wasn't actually designed at all. :-P
(kidding -- Blender is great, but as a way to teach programming... the phrase "now you've got TWO problems" comes to mind.)

Take a look at Alice. There are even textbooks based on it.

an instance of Unix - perhaps PC-BSD, or possibly that Finnish fake called Linux. Yes, it's quite possible. I know a 9 year old who installed Kubuntu successfully. He needed to be told the 'phone and IP numbers of the ISP, but that's all. Then connect a green text terminal to it and get them to understand that typing commands does not result in a fate worse than death, you know, something like creating serious laundry problems. Once they get the idea that it's ok to touch a keyboard, they might like to risk having their little minds corrupted by being entertained by one of the GUI oriented packages such as: Alice; Scratch; or perhaps the Squeak Smalltalk E-Toys?

On those lines, has anyone tried the alice software? www.alice.org

Randy was very proud of this achievement, so giving it some attention/discussion seems appropriate here.

The software is designed to be a teaching tool. A.k.a a "serious game" for all of you game programmers out there.

Randy Pausch was instrumental in the early stages of Alice. The project has taken on a life of its own, and is now "a multi-university initiative". The Alice Team is a collaboration of faculty, staff, and students. The software is presented as a free gift from Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Randy Pausch was part of the team that created Alice, a tool to teach programming masquerading as a game. Salute Dr. Pausch's memory by downloading Alice and playing with it. And if you can, help the effort to finish Alice v. 3!

Randy was partially responsible for the creation of an Entertainment Technology program at Sierra Nevada College. His program, Alice, was used as the tool that introduced many of us to creating Virtual Worlds.
I was in the first class they did for this and it was absolutely incredible. CMU really helped SNC get its program off the ground.

Fruits of the man's labor here (Alice)

http://www.alice.org/

The "Last Lecture" book is really great for anyone wanting to read something very uplifting and truly inspirational, especially for geeks. The guy was more concerned with passing on his love for life than focusing on how he would die.

On those lines, has anyone tried the alice software?
www.alice.org

Randy was very proud of this achievement, so giving it some attention/discussion seems appropriate here.

I have kids around the same age, and got them into the Alice environment for a while. It fell out of favor after a bit, but some of the concepts seemed to help later on when my son got a Lego Mindstorm set. My son is currently digging showing off pics of his lego creations on the lego community kids portal. He keeps bugging me for a "real" digital camera, as he has one of those cheap $15 deals from Wal Mart. I've been toying with getting him a better camera, registering a domain name for him, then teach him the basics of HTML and see what he does with it.

http://www.alice.org/ Check this website for all the tools to get them started programming.

Carnegie Mellon has an interesting free project called Alice ( http://www.alice.org/ ) that is described as a "scripting and prototyping environment program for 3D object behavior." It is cross-platform and seems to be very easy to learn.

Getting slightly more adventurous, I'd suggest PHP, HTML, and CSS. They're fun, relatively straightforward, and more or less forgiving, while still being pretty powerful.

After that, the multitude of desktop programming languages (Java, C, etc.) might be a logical next step.

Being a C programmer, I'd naturally advise against Ruby, Python, etc., but in all seriousness, since your son is a beginning programmer, the nuances and reasons for the existence of those languages will be lost on him. Sure, they may be easy to learn and use, but if you want him to grow up with a natural love of *NIX, the "C and Perl" route is likely the best eventual course.

As far as textual material on the topics, Google is by far the best resource. I've taught myself much of what I know, and I've found that, while O'Reilly books make great references and SAMS books make great tutorials, nothing beats a good search engine and the knowledge (and sometimes outright stupidity) of the internet community.

Most languages dont give much back quickly. You need something that will catch and hold their attention. 3D graphics and Robotics are cool to kids (and many of us geeks) and actually not that hard to break into. In fact both are used very effectively to introduce middle school and older students to programming - even high level stuff like AI (or autonomous behaviors). And the links below are Open Source!

Check out Alice.org

"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience."

Or how about Robotics?
Myro and Institute for Robotics Education
or its pure python predecessor Pyro Robotics

Here's an idea: http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=what_is_alice/what_is_alice It's a great intro to object oriented programming and would probably draw the video game types.

How about Alice?

JJ

This is an interesting environment. You get a 3d environment to play in and prompted programming statements. Although not a "real" language, it would be a good introduction to programming and gives some immediate feedback to the beginner.

http://www.alice.org/

http://www.alice.org/ I heard about this almost a year ago in a talk by Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon University, but haven't had time to check it out. It is supposed to make the learning experience of programming better. Also maybe if you have some first programs written a bit of competition could do no harm: http://www.topcoder.com/ The series of Head First books from O'Reilly also made a favourable impression on me.

Try Alice. It's the 21st century version of turtle:

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

http://www.alice.org/
Nice 3d programming tool, and useful too.
he'll amaze friends!

An interesting looking, cross-platform, 3d-oriented educational programming laguage. Free, source available, but not OSS. http://www.alice.org/

Perhaps a bit older than you were looking for

Storytelling Alice - Designed for Middle School
http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/index.html

Phun is an educational, entertaining and somewhat addictive piece of software for designing and exploring 2D multi-physics simulations in a cartoony fashion.

http://www.vrlab.umu.se/research/phun/

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

http://www.alice.org/

Alice

Thank you, the fact that it is a curriculum issue and not a Java issue was what my post was going to say, you said and lived it. The other thing I was going to post was that it didn't take long for someone to come out and attack Java. I say "didn't take long" because there was just an article on how the Alice( http://www.alice.org/ ) project was a great programmers learning tool and it so happens that they are porting it to Eclipse and Java for the v3.0 release. If you don't know, Alice is a drag-N-drop programming tool for manipulating a 3D graphics environment/world.

Here's the spiel on the next version:
http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=sims_announcement/sims_announcement

BTW, a few years ago, Microsoft was out and about paying off university professors to change their curriculum to use MS .Net instead of Java. Some Universities got nailed for accepting such tainted deals. So when I read about Alice and watched the videos, besides thinking how cool it was, I also was wondering what kind of response from Redmond we would get tossed at us. It's pretty lame to say that Java is to blame for CS sudents not knowing what data structures are or what C++ programming is all about. Now I'll have to read the article and see if they advocate MS .Net instead.

LoB

Thank you, the fact that it is a curriculum issue and not a Java issue was what my post was going to say, you said and lived it. The other thing I was going to post was that it didn't take long for someone to come out and attack Java. I say "didn't take long" because there was just an article on how the Alice( http://www.alice.org/ ) project was a great programmers learning tool and it so happens that they are porting it to Eclipse and Java for the v3.0 release. If you don't know, Alice is a drag-N-drop programming tool for manipulating a 3D graphics environment/world.

Here's the spiel on the next version:
http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=sims_announcement/sims_announcement

BTW, a few years ago, Microsoft was out and about paying off university professors to change their curriculum to use MS .Net instead of Java. Some Universities got nailed for accepting such tainted deals. So when I read about Alice and watched the videos, besides thinking how cool it was, I also was wondering what kind of response from Redmond we would get tossed at us. It's pretty lame to say that Java is to blame for CS sudents not knowing what data structures are or what C++ programming is all about. Now I'll have to read the article and see if they advocate MS .Net instead.

LoB

It's kind of off-topic, but I read some inspirational lecture slides by Randy Pausch about time management a little while ago. In light of his illness, I guess there's two ways to take it: Perhaps time management isn't that important in the end, or perhaps the limited amount of time each of us may have makes it even more important.

(Or, I suppose, the stress related to worrying about time management may affect your health...)

Animation and 3d are great ways to show the concepts. Beats the heck out of static reading/powerpoints, especially for modern high schoolers. Jim Blinn & cohorts at Cal tech did a pair of great works on Physics (The Mechanical Universe, circa 1987) and Project Mathmeatics (much more recent). Then try your own lessons (or have the kids do some) using Alice 3D

Project Mathematics Home Page

Project MATHEMATICS! videos explore basic topics in high school mathematics in ways that cannot be done at the chalkboard or in a textbook. They bring mathematics to life with imaginative computer animation, live action, music, special effects, and a sense of humor.

Mechanical Universe Home

The Mechanical Universe...and Beyond is a critically-acclaimed series of 52 thirty-minute videotape programs covering the basic topics of an introductory university physics course. The series was originally produced as a broadcast telecourse by the California Institute of Technology and Intelecom, Inc. with program funding from the Annenberg/CPB Project.

see see Jim Blinn's title list

Sorry, wrong link....I meant this Alice language: http://alice.org/

Layne

I'm an 18 year old just finishing his last programming courses in high school, so I can give a slightly different perspective of this. I hate to be cocky, but simply put, I'm better at programming than most of my friends. Many people I know are interested in taking programming courses but are daunted by the pages of code they have to deal with. The concepts of programming logic are hard for some to handle, even if the interest is there. I started with Visual Basic then moved on to Java and then AP level Java. My teacher is one of the leaders of comp sci teaching in my county, so he loved to use methods such as Jeroo or Alice, both similar to Scratch, to teach programming. The reaction from the students who were struggling in the class was outstanding. Seeing a little arrow move around picking up flowers or seeing a Turtle Prince dance and change colors totally change the way they look at programming. Having something like Scratch in middle schools (I think elementary may be a little early) would be awesome. Classes like those are optional, and it's not "forcing programming down kids throats". Having a basic knowledge of how programming works will spark potential interest in computers as a career, especially in young girls who shy away from the stereotypical nerd programming classes. Something like this will definitely benefit our schools.

Reminds me a bit of the 'Alice' project from CMU - they seem to have a similar visual programming metaphor:

http://alice.org/

As others have posted, this is a rather old program and a lot has changed since then. Even Alice has gone through a few iterations. But I don't think enough people know about it yet, so I hope it gains some wider usage now.

That's how we did it old school. These days kids learn OO concepts with graphical programming environments they don't know are graphical programming environments. Try out Alice by Carnegie Mellon and see how kids (or adults) can create "interactive stories" that a using 3D graphical objects. It's pretty cool. Version 3 (in development) will utilize graphical models from EA's The Sims 2, to allow creation of more realistic stories (see the press release), but even with crude graphics, kids end up learning how to make a collection of objects communicate via inherent or user-added methods.

That's how we did it old school. These days kids learn OO concepts with graphical programming environments they don't know are graphical programming environments. Try out Alice by Carnegie Mellon and see how kids (or adults) can create "interactive stories" that a using 3D graphical objects. It's pretty cool. Version 3 (in development) will utilize graphical models from EA's The Sims 2, to allow creation of more realistic stories (see the press release), but even with crude graphics, kids end up learning how to make a collection of objects communicate via inherent or user-added methods.

http://www.alice.org/

Alice is free from Carnegie Mellon University made just for kids.
At Version 3 they are getting help form the people at Electronic Arts to be able to include the Sims characters.

My 14 and 12 year old have had a lot of fun building programs with this.
It has it's limitations but it's a great start.