Best Introduction To Programming For Bright 11-14-Year-Olds?

firthisaword writes "I will be teaching an enrichment programming course to 11-14 year old gifted children in the Spring. It is meant as an introduction to very basic programming paradigms (conditions, variables, loops, etc.), but the kids will invariably have a mix of experience in dealing with computers and programming. The question: Which programming language would be best for starting these kids off on? I am tempted by QBasic which I remember from my early days — it is straightforward and fast, if antiquated and barely supported under XP. Others have suggested Pascal which was conceived as an instructional pseudocode language. Does anyone have experience in that age range? Anything you would recommend? And as a P.S: Out of the innumerable little puzzles/programs/tasks that novice programmers get introduced to such as Fibonacci numbers, primes or binary calculators, which was the most fun and which one taught you the most?" A few years ago, a reader asked a similar but more general question, and several questions have focused on how to introduce kids to programming. Would you do anything different in teaching kids identified as academically advanced?

Comments

Re:Lego Mindstorm

[bigkahunah]

The software is LabView from National Instruments in Austin, TX. If you contact them they would probably give you at least one cd for free. I'm interning with them in the summer. LabView is a visual programming language that they sell with the fact that you don't have to get so worried about the little details i.e. semicolons in the wrong place and such.

Re:Bright vs. Hard Workers

[porcupine8]

Thank you for your anecdote. Sadly, it does not cancel out decades of research. Here, I will give my own anecdote to cancel yours: My husband skipped the third grade, and not only did he suffer no ill effects from it at any point, his fourth grade teacher wanted to skip him to fifth because she didn't realize he'd already been skipped.

You see, they have devised these things called "statistics" so that we don't have to play dueling anecdotes all day. And the statistics from many, many studies show that the vast majority of grade-skipped children have no negative social or emotional effects from it. Most of those who do had problems before the skipping and the problems just weren't fixed by the skipping.