Slashdot Mirror

Hands down, Phrogram is the best language for teaching young people to program. It's a language purpose-built for teaching kids (it used to be called KPL or "Kids Programming Language") and it scales with the child. A young person can start by coding simple graphical applications and "graduate" to database access and even sockets programming. http://phrogram.com/

I taught my brother a bit using KPL, but looks like it has been replaced with Phrogram To me, it was like what I could do in BASIC years old - a few lines of code to draw some cool shapes then animate them. Very minimal meta-programming (importing libraries, using statements, make scripts, etc.) I actually was using it and feeling kinda jealous, like "why can't I be this productive in real languages?" It was a heck of a lot of fun too.

How is this http://phrogram.com/content//featurecomparison.aspx "free"?
As it comes from MS, it is not open and not portable either.

Bad choice.

http://phrogram.com/kpl.aspx I've started teaching my son (8 years old) with Phrogram - it allows for all the needed pieces of programming, gives quick results, and has a nice little IDE (all free of course).

I've been teaching to the same age group that you are and after evaluating everything from QBasic to Java to Squeakland's EToys I settled on Phrogram about two years ago (it was called Kids Programming Language at that time) and I am well pleased. Using this language (it's much like classic Visual Basic but with tools that are more appropriate to the target age group) my kids started by learning basic concepts and syntax and slowly graduated to more complex tasks involving graphics. Best of all, Phrogram includes constructs for data manipulation so my kids are also learning what I consider "real" programming -- writing software that reads, manipulates, and stores data. There is an add-on that provides networking constructs for sockets programming and such but we haven't used it yet. As they mature it will be natural for kids using Phrogram to transition into .Net, Java, or any other commonly used business or Internet programming language. So, from my experience as a teacher, I suggest that you look at Phrogram.

I've been teaching computers for the past 4 years to middle school students in Japan. Here are the programs I use:

Grade 6: Drape
Grade 7: Gamemaker
Grade 8: Phrogram (formerly KPL)
Grade 9: Javascript

The first two, Drape and Gamemaker, are simple-to-use drag-n-drop programming languages. Drape is no longer freely available, but you can download it, and lesson plans, from my homepage, http://www.christianthompson.com?For_Teachers/.

Gamemaker is freely available (shareware with just a few advanced features crippled). It can be downloaded at http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/

Phrogram is a BASIC-like programming language that has a number of built-in function for doing things like drawing and manipulating sprites, which as we all know is what students really want to do! Strangely, I found that they're not super-keen on converting miles to kilometers! You can download it for free at http://www.phrogram.com/.

If you don't know what JavaScript is, stop reading now, please. :) I use the program Max's HTML Beauty for my HTML / CSS / JavaScript unit. It is also freeware and can be downloaded at http://www.htmlbeauty.com/.

If any teachers out there have any other ideas, would like more information on my curriculum, or wish to collaborate on lessons, please feel free to contact me at christian[at]christianthompson.com.

Cheers,

Christian

If anyone's interested in Alice, there's an archive of Alice summer camp projects here.

Hey, I learned C the "real programmer's" way, from K&R version 1 ... but that was more than 20 years ago, and things have moved on :-)

Something I came across recently is Phrogram http://phrogram.com/. It was formerly known as KPL -- Kid's Programming Languague. It's Windows-only and it's not Free (Libre) but the "express" version is free. The premise of Phrogram is that what got many of us into coding all those years ago was stuff like BASIC on the Apple/Commodore/Atari/BBC/whatever that let you do "coo stuff" easily. Of course, the definition of "cool stuff" has moved on so Phrogram aims to make it easy to do stuff like 2D and 3D game development easily (there's a great demo of flying a 3D spaceship in 30 lines of code).

I've got no affiliation with Phrogram -- but if you want to get kids hooked on coding, it may be worth a look

There are workarounds, but the 360 controller is the only first class citizen... It looks like a nice controller, but come on! DirectInput is nice because of how easy it is to abstract the input devices. For XNA to be viable for PC games, it really has to support legacy hardware...

I also haven't been impressed with graphics speed. I'm just getting started with XNA, so I'm really making the graphics statement based on the SpaceWar starter kit. It is probably not the best example, but it is the only one I've looked at in depth.

Another option for bedroom programmers (who came up with THAT name???), is Phrogram. It was called Kids Programming Language, but my how it has grown. The new commercial version (which I think runs about $60) can compile MSIL code, so it can run in the .Net JIT CLR. I've seen better samples from Phrogram than XNA, but that could change since XNA is still in beta.

I think it would be great to lower the development bar so that a greater number of creative people could get involved. Think of how many great mods there are for existing games. The best games aren't always made by the best programmers...

Phrogram

Great programming language for kids!

Checkout http://phrogram.com/ Any kid or adult can program in Phrogram, it's super easy... And it's .NET based, so the learner can pick up the basics of the framework. Includes lots of examples, too. And yeah, I too miss Commadore -- learned on a Vic-20 myself :-)

http://www.phrogram.com./ It's actually the second version of Kid's Programming Language, will release next month, and is available as a release candidate download now. It's supposed to be as easy to use as KPL, but it adds some new stuff: compiling to EXEs, class-based programming, 3D programming with DirectX models, file I/O, and interactive debugging.