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David Brin Laments Absence of Programming For Kids

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the watch-johnny-run-run-johnny-run dept.

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."

5 of 355 comments (clear)

  1. Lego Mindstorm? by drewzhrodague · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

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  2. Umm... by PFI_Optix · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com/

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  3. Re:There are options by Grayputer · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  4. Re:There are options by toph42 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:There are options by Cobralisk · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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