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When my daughter was younger and one day she said she wanted to do what daddy was doing I bought Toontalk. http://www.toontalk.com/

It is more like playing a game than programming, it teaches looping as well as some maths and includes flashcards.

So is Toon Talk http://www.toontalk.com/

Here's a better way. http://www.toontalk.com/ I bought this for my daughter when she was 4, the software was awesome with it's lego like look, she had the hang of looping for if whiles in a few days.

I'm also very interested in programming games. So far I haven't found any that are exactly what I want, but there are some enjoyable ones.

I used to do programming contests in college, while I enjoyed these I always felt like I wasn't learning enough. They're designed so that you'd need a very good team and lots of outside training. It isn't nearly as much fun outside of real (or even practice) competition, but you can find big banks of problems and an online judge if you want to play along. TopCoder is similar and much easier to participate in, but again its focus is on competition, not education (though maybe that's changed?).

The closest I've seen in video games are those by Zachtronics Industries, they all deal in some way with engineering design. SpaceChem in particular is quite programming-like (as explored here) and has a great difficulty progression. Kohctpyktop is an integrated circuit design puzzle with a strong test driven development bent, though if I hadn't already studied EE it would probably be prohibitively difficult.

There's also pleasingfungus' Manufactoria, which has a lot of CS (stack machine) stuff in it and a great sense of progression.

A lot of these attempts tend to be directed at kids; the old Rocky's Boots was one of the first steps in this direction, with logic gates and simple circuits. I didn't find it very good, but ToonTalk is an ambitious visual programming environment and game-like tutorial rooted in SmallTalk semantics.

Cort Stratton wrote a post in September called The Games Programmers Play, which covers this topic well. The comments here on Slashdot and on Gamasutra suggest some more such games.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about designing "games for learning programming", I've written somewhat more extensively about it on my blog. I hope you find some of these suggestions interesting, sorry for the linkstorm.

I've worked with 3-years olds using ToonTalk, which in spite of looking cartoonish is actually a full-fledged programming language. They have managed to create a few simple programs, like "play ball with a robot" and the like. Take a look at the demo videos with commentaries included in the installation. My own daughter started using it at 2, albeit only for building stuff. (Shameless plug: you can read all details on my PhD thesis.)

Squeak looks like a simple paint program, but painted objects can have properties and behaviors. The Drive a Car tutorial shows the basics of Squeak. Squeak.org provides much more detail about how Squeak extends Smalltalk. Squeak is free and supported by a large user community.

ToonTalk presents a 2 1/2 dimension cartoon world with animated tools and characters that can learn activities. Very weird. ToonTalk 2 costs $25 and has promised version 3 for over a year.

Like most geeks of a certain age, I cut my coding teeth on BASIC, which in its traditional implementations (TRS-80, Apple ][, C64) was nicely interactive, but probably too boringly textual for Kids These Days.® Don't know how the "modern" versions of it compare.

Logo became available to me after I was "too advanced" for it, but certainly deserves a look as the "other" classical language for introductory programming.

I've heard some good things about Toon Talk.

Or there's always BrainFuck.

A few years ago I was banging away at my keyboard writing some program. My daughter came up to me and mentioned that she "wanted to do what I was doing", I asked if she wanted to use the computer and she said "no, I want to program". Well, I set about looking for something for a 5 year old to program with and found, http://www.toontalk.com/

I have to say it was the best $30 I have spent. Here it is 2 years later and she is using languages like Pearl and Python.

Toontalk http://www.toontalk.com/ is still one of the most interesting visual languages out there.

You program by controlling a character who can move around a landscape with his or her tool set. Using the tools, you teach robots (an analog of a subroutine) how to do something.

It's couched as a game for kids, but in fact it's a complete language with strong semantics. (If you have kids you should try it out on them. If you don't, you should try it out on yourself.)

Ken Kahn really deserves huge appreciation for the brilliance of the ideas in his software; I'd like to see him receive the Turing Award for this work; I think it will prove to be incredibly influential. I am absolutely serious. Don't be mislead by the cartoon style that it employs.

Jeff

Check out toontalk for a graphical programming environment that looks like legoland.

Also see how the objects-first people are teaching programming nowadays. In the first week of class they have people drawing faces using OO programming, without loops or branches. For example, they have the students create a drawing program using event callbacks.

I heavily got into using a computer, I started playing online flight sims, moved to modding the game then building models for it, then eventually to programming my own apps.

My first contact with anything resembling a computer aside from gaming consoles was a C-64 keyboard, I would site for hours writing the lines of code in the booklet to see the balloons float across the screen, then recode to alter the balloons in some way.

Last year my 7 year old who was then 6 walked up on me while I was writing an app, and said "daddy, I want to do what you are doing", I was so proud that she wanted to be a little programmer. Bieng 6 she doesn't read nor write well enough yet to use a higher level language. She has had her own pc an old PII 233 with 128 megs of ram and an old 8 meg video card plenty to run 90% of the kids games out there. I did some research and found a program written by a professor who taught for awhile at MIT who also was in the same boat, kids wanted to program but were not developed enough for a higher language, so he began working with a few friends to develop a software pakage that taught children the basics of programming. It didn't teach syntax, but it teaches the basic concepts, loops, addition, multilication, division, and subtraction. You have a robot, you have to tell teh robot to do a specific task before he does anything. Once you tell him what to do you set the algorithym to tell him how long to do it. Turns out she loves the game.

For those who also have young children interested in programming here is the link. Well worth the $30 for the software. http://www.toontalk.com/

• Stagecast www.stagecast.com
• ToonTalk
• 3d GameMaker
• Lego Mindstorms
• Flash

This game is actually very sophisticated with a natural way of expressing concurrency. www.toontalk.com The author is active in the capability based security world. By "capability" I mean the definition used in the security literature, not the linux bastardization of the term.

As far as games for the kiddie crowd which help with creativity, there's always Toontalk.

It's sort of an abstract programming language that represents simple concepts as robots, houses, boxes, and other manipulatable items onscreen. Kids (or bored adults) can make/trade games created with it and such. Useless for anything very complex at all, but a cute idea, at least.

There's been some work in making programming environments for children. Of course there is LOGO. Some other examples are ToonTalk and KidSim (couldn't find a good KidSim link).

Alice)
Essentially a 3D version of Logo. Users program 3D worlds and have characters which interact. Very cool (and no cost). The underlying language is Python.

Agentsheets
Stagecast
Both very good environments which allow children to build simulations of anything which interests them. They both use visual languages to reduce the need for keyboards.

ToonTalk
Users program robots to perform tasks. All done using programming by demonstration.

Lego Mindstorms
Yeah, don't need to write anything here. It's wicked.

Alternatively, you can wait until I develop my environment, but don't held your breath...:)

The best way "to engage students' creativity and problem solving skills" is computer programming. Several people have suggested some very good special purpose programming languages:

Incredible Machine, Mind Rover, Lemmings (a slight stretch), LEGO Mindstorms, Rocky's Boots (and Robot Odyssey should be included here)

Someone's suggestion to try Java was called "cruel and unusual punishment" and that is probably accurate but some general purpose programming languages are appropriate:

Logo is being used in a few Juvenile Detention Centers. Seymour Papert is involved in such a project.

Stagecast Creator is pretty simple and sort of general.

ToonTalk (my baby) is a general purpose programming language that looks and feels like a computer game.

www.toontalk.com

toontalk

I am not affiliated with anyone at Animated Programs. My niece and nephew really liked it.

Unfortunately it requires associating with the Evil Empire (M$), ( Wouldn't work under WINE either last time I tried it a few months ago. It needs ActiveX but it's pretty good stuff none the less. )

Message for moderators:-

Please boost this up it's really good stuff!

Unfortunately it requires associating with the Evil Empire (M$), ( Wouldn't work under WINE either last time I tried it a few months ago. It needs ActiveX but it's pretty good stuff none the less. )

Message for moderators:-

Please boost this up it's really good stuff!

My general advice for little kids and programming:

LOGO, for visual stimuli, for variables and procedures.

ToonTalk, for a graphical construction environment, teaching pattern-matching and declarative rule-based programming.

Prolog and Java, once the kid is ready to forego the graphical environment.

Why Prolog? ToonTalk is based on Prolog's inference concepts, and I advocate straight Prolog after that. I think too many kids start out with BASIC, Pascal and C, and are forever bent on the idea that procedural languages are all there is to programming.

Danny Hillis (of Connection Machine fame and author of The Pattern on the Stone : The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work) gave a keynote address at this year's Game Developer Conference on this topic. He made a strong case for the idea that computer games (in the broad sense) are now the dominant source of culture and narrative. And that this is probably a good thing. Culture was once participatory and social - e.g., story telling around the camp fire but reading novels, watching theater, opera, TV and movies is passive. Computer entertainment is interactive. It engages. And significant learning is involved.

-ken kahn

Danny Hillis (of Connection Machine fame and author of The Pattern on the Stone : The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work) gave a keynote address at this year's Game Developer Conference on this topic. He made a strong case for the idea that computer games (in the broad sense) are now the dominant source of culture and narrative. And that this is probably a good thing. Culture was once participatory and social - e.g., story telling around the camp fire but reading novels, watching theater, opera, TV and movies is passive. Computer entertainment is interactive. It engages. And significant learning is involved.

-ken kahn

My general advice for little kids and programming:

LOGO, for visual stimuli, for variables and procedures.

ToonTalk, for a graphical construction environment, teaching pattern-matching and declarative rule-based programming.

Prolog and Java, once the kid is ready to forego the graphical environment.

Why Prolog? ToonTalk is based on Prolog's inference concepts, and I advocate straight Prolog after that. I think too many kids start out with BASIC, Pascal and C, and are forever bent on the idea that procedural languages are all there is to programming.

As the author of ToonTalk, I'd like to clarify this a bit. ToonTalk is a descendant of Prolog (via Concurrent Prolog, Herbrand, and Janus). See the paper "From Prolog and Zelda to ToonTalk". But equally accurately one can describe ToonTalk as a concurrent object-oriented system. Teams of robots correspond to the methods of an object. They typically run concurrently (in different houses or on the back of pictures) and they communicate and synchronize by giving birds messages to deliver to their nests. While there is no notion of inheritance, delegation is straight-forward to program.

And despite the sophisticated underlying computation model, it is appropriate for 6 year olds (as well as adults). See for example the European Playground Project that has been helping 6 to 8 year olds build computer games in ToonTalk.

- ken kahn

My general advice for little kids and programming:

LOGO, for visual stimuli, for variables and procedures.

ToonTalk, for a graphical construction environment, teaching pattern-matching and declarative rule-based programming.

Prolog and Java, once the kid is ready to forego the graphical environment.

Why Prolog? ToonTalk is based on Prolog's inference concepts, and I advocate straight Prolog after that. I think too many kids start out with BASIC, Pascal and C, and are forever bent on the idea that procedural languages are all there is to programming.

Let me explain why programmability is such an important thing by starting with these two quotes:

Alan Kay ("Computer Software'", Scientific American, September 1984) wrote:

"The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated. Even more important, it is fun, and therefore intrinsically worth doing. ... Computers are to computing as instruments are to music. Software is the score, whose interpretation amplifies our reach and lifts our spirit. Leonardo da Vinci called music ``the shaping of the invisible,'' and his phrase is even more apt as a description of software."

Danny Hillis in his book "Magic in the Stone", Basic Books, 1998 writes:

"These days, computers are popularly thought of as multi-media devices, capable of incorporating and combining all previous forms of media - text, graphics, moving pictures, sound. I think this point of view leads to an underestimation of the computer's potential. It is certainly true that a computer can incorporate and manipulate all other media, but the true power of the computer is that it is capable of manipulating not just the expression of ideas but also the ideas themselves. The amazing thing to me is not that a computer can hold the contents of all books in a library but that it can notice relationships between concepts described in the books - not that it can display a picture of a bird in flight or a galaxy spinning but that it can imagine and produce the consequences of the physical laws that create these wonders. The computer is not just an advanced calculator or camera or paintbrush; rather, it is a device that accelerates and extends our processes of thought. It is an imagination machine, which starts with the ideas we put into it and takes them farther than we ever could have taken them on our own."

OK, so then what happens. Sony, Nintendo, Sega, etc. take these wonderful computers and close them off to everyone but licensed developers. Of course, the PS2 is a computer whether YABASIC is bundled with it or not. But it is important news that a computer that has the potential of reaching tens of millions of homes will not be completely closed (at least in Europe). Sony should release YABASIC in the rest of the world as well.

Is Basic the best choice of a programming language for the PS2? We could argue about what other languages would have been better (and that might be fun), but the important fact is that some general purpose programming language is there. Suppose some other language X is twice as good as Basic. The percentage increase from Basic to X is 100% improvement while from nothing to Basic is an infinite improvement.

Having said that, I'd like to plug my own language, ToonTalk, as a much better choice. Rather than typing text with a virtual keyboard and then trying to read a program on a TV screen, in ToonTalk you construct your program from inside of a game world. You train robots, give birds messages to deliver, drop things in boxes, use animated tools, etc. to construct and run programs. No need for a virtual keyboard. No need to try to read text on a TV while sitting 10 feet away on the couch. And children much younger than 10 are making games with it.

-ken kahn

See http://www.toontalk.com/english/eas ydo it.htm for more details.

Before I try to answer this question, as the author of ToonTalk, I'm very pleased with all the interest that these SlashDot discussions have generated in ToonTalk. So much interest that www.toontalk.com has become overloaded so I made a mirror at www.animated-programs.com/ToonTalk.

So if ToonTalk started beta testing in 1995 then why isn't it better known? Well first off beta testing revealed that too few kids were comfortable with just exploring ToonTalk unaided. So I generated many narrated demos, puzzle sequences, and added Marty, a speaking guide/coach, to ToonTalk. Also beta testing revealed that while kids really mastered the basic stuff in ToonTalk they found the sprite/game stuff confusing. So that needed to be completely redesigned and rebuilt. (And I'm proud to say that it is working so well now that a big European research project is using it to enable 6 to 8 years to build their own games - see www.ioe.ac.uk/playground.)

So ToonTalk was ready in 1998 and I showed it to more than a dozen publishers of kids or educational software. The typical response from the technical people was very positive and from the marketing people I heard comments like "It is too hard to explain", "We're not in the business of educating customers", and "What line or two on the box could make it sell in big numbers". A publisher in Sweden was the first exception, followed by one in the UK, then Portugal, and then Brazil. And a Japanese version is in final testing.

So ToonTalk was self-published in North America. This means there is no marketing budget and a small PR budget (already spent). So it has been spreading by word of mouth, nice articles like the one in Dr. Dobb's Journal (Feb 99), some things I've written (e.g. March 2000 Communications of the ACM), and forums like this one.

Best,

If your kids are too old for "kid stuff", start 'em off with HyperCard, a great introduction to object-oriented programming concepts like inheritance, encapsulation, and message passing. The embedded programming language, HyperTalk, supports functions, event-based methods, recursion, etc., with a very English-like syntax. HyperCard provides a visual object hierarchy already populated with rich actions, and extensible with additional functions and methods. (The object hierarchy is not easily extensible, but by the time the kids hit that limit they will be ready for Java, Perl, or Python.)

The only drawbacks to these two great teaching tools is that neither one of them runs on Linux! (ToonTalk: Windows only; HyperCard: Mac only)

If your kids are too old for "kid stuff", start 'em off with HyperCard, a great introduction to object-oriented programming concepts like inheritance, encapsulation, and message passing. The embedded programming language, HyperTalk, supports functions, event-based methods, recursion, etc., with a very English-like syntax. HyperCard provides a visual object hierarchy already populated with rich actions, and extensible with additional functions and methods. (The object hierarchy is not easily extensible, but by the time the kids hit that limit they will be ready for Java, Perl, or Python.)

The only drawbacks to these two great teaching tools is that neither one of them runs on Linux! (ToonTalk: Windows only; HyperCard: Mac only)

If your kids are too old for "kid stuff", start 'em off with HyperCard, a great introduction to object-oriented programming concepts like inheritance, encapsulation, and message passing. The embedded programming language, HyperTalk, supports functions, event-based methods, recursion, etc., with a very English-like syntax. HyperCard provides a visual object hierarchy already populated with rich actions, and extensible with additional functions and methods. (The object hierarchy is not easily extensible, but by the time the kids hit that limit they will be ready for Java, Perl, or Python.)

The only drawbacks to these two great teaching tools is that neither one of them runs on Linux! (ToonTalk: Windows only; HyperCard: Mac only)

ToonTalk seems more appropriate for younger would-be programmers.

"ToonTalk is a video game for making video games."

"It's an animated world where kids can make, run, debug, and trade programs."

But what really gets me excited is "ToonTalk is an interpreter for a concurrent constraint programming language"

Apparently once you've assembled your game it will automatically translate it into a Java applet. Wow!

Squeak has a lot going for it, but familiarity for Windows users is not on the list. Probably a better choice would be Dolphin Smalltalk; it "feels like Windows" (a good thing in this case), it's a real Smalltalk, it comes with good tutorial documentation, and there's a free (as in beer) version available.

Good news: Smalltalk was designed (back in the 1970s, assuming computers as powerful as we have today!) to be a programming language for kids. Bad news: Really smart kids took to it like fish to water, but most really struggled.

Those of us who cut our teeth on punch cards and Teletypes were used to command line (or worse) interfaces and text programs. Today's kids aren't; even typing Smalltalk programs may bore them.

Consider Stagecast Creator or Toon Talk as a couple of purely visual development environments. They're more suited towards development of games and simulations, but that's a plus if the goal is to get your children excited about programming (probably the right target at first).

Here are a couple of stories about teaching kids to program: This one from Kids Domain has a lot of links to resources, while this one from Suite101.com is an interview (with fewer but entirely distinct links).

People have already mentioned Python. I'd give some consideration to Dr. Scheme or to Haskell (the latter especially in view of the recent book The Haskell School of Expression).

Mindsprings for sure. But check out ToonTalk, there's a trial version for download. Actually I encourage everyone at /. to try it - a very imaginative teaching environment, and you might learn something about concurrent constraing programming languages as well! -- Dave