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Teaching Programming Skills to Children?
KlaatuVN asks: "My younger siblings are asking for ways to learn to program. If I remember correctly, when I was younger I started programming by writing games like 'Lemonade Stand' in BASIC for the Commodore 64. Short of finding a Commodore 64 emulator and digging up some old BASIC programming books somewhere, what do you think is a good way of teaching children to program? I'm not trying to start a 'language war', but that does enter into it. Should I start with a scripting language? What, O Wise Slashdot Readers, are your opinions?" When I was just starting out in computers, I remember LOGO being a big help in teaching me the logic skills I would eventually use as a programmer. I know LOGO is still around, but it would be interesting to note if there are other similar projects like it. What tools, and programs would you use to teach programming skills to interested youngsters?
Stagecast Creator is a fairly elementary language that can introduce the young ones to object oriented thinking. You can program multi-level games and applications like calculators. Each object is defined by its set of parameters and how it interacts with other objects. A few friends of mine have used it to introduce their kids to programming and have found it to be pretty successful.
TiFox
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
Good luck finding it - but if you do it is a killer teacher of Boolean Logic.
Last time I played it was on an Apple IIe.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Macromedia Director (or Revolution, or Hypercard) seem to be a natural for an introductory taste to programming... at least they were for me.
My "real" first taste of programming was BASIC, with the old K-power magazines and my Atari 400/Apple II+. Those were the days.
At any rate, my entry into building actual applications came with Director 1.0, many years later.
It gives a timeline that anyone can animate and assign rudimentary interactivity to -- building presentations, programs, and even specialized applications -- without any programming needed, but also allows for Lingo scripting (as a next step) -- which you can achieve pretty much anything with.
Lingo is very close to BASIC, but the syntax comes closer to C/Javascript/PHP, and it's getting more object-oriented with every revision.
The bottom line is that *anyone* can build an application or presentation with any of these tools that work, without programming.
But *with* programming, you can add bells, whistles and functions that wouldn't be possible working in the timeline alone.
From there, kids can (if they have aptitude) make the jump to C or scripting languages once they can understand more complicated syntax.
Just my thoughts, but if someone tried to teach Perl or VBScript to an 8-year-old, I think it'd be an uphill battle.
A battle I'd pay to see, because I think it'd be much funnier than anything that's broadcast on TV these days, at any rate.
God, I miss LOGO.
--dr00gy
Though I don't have children I would think that something like Robocode would be ideal. Considering that you can get almost instant feedback for the changes you make, and that it's a game, which if my niece is any indication, will consume any child above 2.5yrs to the point of tears when bedtime comes around.
- Gef
Depends on the age. For younger children I'd teach Visual Basic instead of QuickBasic. For older ones, I'd start with C.
I have seen a lot of programming languages for kids around:
1. Squeak. (Based on smalltalk). Graphical environment that has all sorts of 3d, sound, voice, etc stuff to play with. Everything is editable, down right to the squeak environment (of course this isnt mandatory, but can be done). Squeak kind sucks for professional work (its kinda slow, being an emulated environment) but is great to teach stuff on. Heck, it even has a part that kids can "program" without writing a line of code (using a visual paradigm that I dont have the most experience with, sorry). (oh, btw, squeak runs on all platforms)
2. Logo. Yup, still alive and kicking. Also runs on all platforms. If you want to teach multiagent systems, then you can look into *Logo (star logo).
3. Boxer. A mac only thing that has a lot of educational properties.
4. Toon Talk. Oriented on the younger crowd. Uses a lego like code building process to solve missions. Only for windows i think.
Any way, those programs should more then enough provide an educational start in programming to the younger audience.
This
Seymour Papert, who holds the Lego chair for learning research at MIT (and who created Logo) wrote a book called the Connected Family which addresses this issue. The book is available at amazon, and there's a companion website. In a nutshell, he recommends using meaningful projects to teach programming concepts in an environment like that provided by Logo.
Very young kids have problems with attention span, reading, typing, etc. so you may want to use something like Lego Mindstorms instead of text-based programming.
Actually it's not just kids how have attention span issues who can benefit from Lego Mindstorms. If your siblings haven't yet taken high school geometry yet (or haven't had enough exposure to boolean logic), then Lego Mindstorms is a really cool to get a day-to-week-long introduction. Past that, I'd say, based on my own experience, that (when I was 11) C was difficult for me to pick up until after I learned Pascal. They both have similar structures, but Pascal was a much better introduction because of its use of natural language in most of its syntax.
You can find some tutorials here, here, here, here, and here.
The only problem with Pascal (nowadays) is that compilers/debuggers seem hard to come by. Here's a free one that might help. If that doesn't work, then you could always try something this, but I wouldn't recommend it for the beginner who doesn't even know what compilers or linkers are and why they are necessary.
moto411.com