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MIT Media Lab Making Programming Fun For Kids
An anonymous reader passed us a link to an article on the Boston Globe's website, talking up efforts by MIT to make programming a non-threatening part of grade-school education. MIT has developed a new programming language designed to encourage experimentation and play. Called Scratch, the project eschews manuals and high-level concepts in favour of approachability. "Efforts to make computer programming accessible to young people began in the late 1970s with the advent of the personal PC, when another programming language with roots at MIT — Logo — allowed young people to draw shapes by steering a turtle around a screen by typing out commands. But the path to mastering most programming languages has been strewn with obstacles, since students needed to figure out not only the underlying logic but also master a brand new syntax, observe strict rules about semicolons and bracket use, and figure out what was causing error messages even as they learned the program."
why the lucky stiff has started an amazing project called Hackety Hack, in an attempt to solve the Little Coder's Predicament. It's a development platform designed for the younger coders and beginners, with an emphasis on sharing, community, ease-of-use (lots of built-in functionality), and cute cartoon characters. Currently it teaches Ruby in a series of fun lessons, but _why has stated that it might teach other languages in the future. A slick help interface comes bundled, as well as a Ruby cheat-sheet.
Come and join in the public beta testing. The forum is active and the people are nice. And don't forget to share your exciting hacks with the rest of us!
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Eli
Pygsear is supposed to simplify teaching programming via Python and graphics. It's implemented as a layer on top of PyGame. The author is writing a textbook for a course using it. I haven't used it, so I don't know how effective it is, but it seems to implement the LOGO turtle as well as some sort of retained-mode graphics.
Although Scratch doesn't seem to make this clear, Scratch IS Squeak (well, an even easier to use wrapper anyway), and it's listed as a Squeak project http://www.squeak.org/Projects/
Try for yourself... download Scratch, drag the included image onto your Squeak VM and it'll open fine (although, at least on the Mac version I can't find a way to quit properly).