David Brin Laments Absence of Programming For Kids

An anonymous reader writes "David Brin is an award-winning science fiction writer who has often written on social issues such as privacy and creativity. Now, he's written an essay for Salon.com titled 'Why Johnny Can't Code'. He discusses his son's years-long effort to find a way to use his math book's BASIC programming examples. All they were ever able to find, however, were either children's versions (on the Mac) or 'advanced' versions which attempted to support modern programming requirements (and which required constant review of the user's manual). Ultimately, they ended-up buying an old Commodore 64 on Ebay — Yes, for those of you under the age of 30, 'personal' computers like the Apple II and C64 used to all include BASIC in their ROMs."

Comments

Lego Mindstorm?

[drewzhrodague]

What about the Lego Mindsorm? That has a programming language. I'll bet it is way cooler to use a beginners programming language to build robots, than it was to draw boxes, or calculate your homework.

...and hold on, now! Where's my damn flying car?

Umm...

[PFI_Optix]

http://www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com/

Re:Yeah, really.

[tivoKlr]

Dude, seriously, why the AC. I was going to mod this +1 Funny as Hell, but I don't spend em on AC's...

Oh well.

Re:There are options

[mkosmo]

I only say that because he explicitly stated the use of BASIC in his son's math book. You really cant use a C compiler to run a few lines of BASIC :)

Re:There are options

[Grayputer]

Those are copyright MS. Try freebasic www.freebasic.net for the 'free' version.

download this....

[scharkalvin]

http://blassic.org/

Re:There are options

[toph42]

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.

Re:Teach them PHP

[BradWilliams]

Actually, I learned PHP 3 years ago... I was 13, and it's actually a good way to learn programming syntax without without having to learn about writing classes, methods/functions, etc right from the start, but still learning some basic OOP (writing your own functions and using them). Now I'm learning Delphi(I realize that the syntax is totally different) & Java, but PHP was a good way for me to get into programming... plus it makes me some cash.

Re:You know, though this is a dupe

[chrisbtoo]

Shift-2 is an @ sign on modern keyboards, while " and ' share a key just left of the enter key.

Shift-2 is an @ sign on modern American keyboards. On a British keyboard, it's a ".

Re:I was the submitter of this dupe

[DragonWriter]

I think what Brin wants (and I'm in the same boat though my kids are still just toddlers) is something comparable to learning to write in BLOCK letters, i.e., a temporary stepping stone to more sophisticated methods or languages or cursive writing.

I think StarLogo TNG's use of drag-and-drop blocks is a pretty interesting approach to exactly this need. The blocks have text which allows them to be read like typed-in code, and colors and shapes that indicate function and syntax.

Re:There are options

[Cobralisk]

Funny, we had a robotics class for "gifted studends" in my elementary school using some setup called Lego-Logo. It was around 1989-1990. It was like mindstorms. Build a little Lego gizmo, hook up the controllable parts to the computer, and use LOGO to drive it. See this for some info.