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A High School Programming Curriculum For All Students?

Posted by timothy on from the combat-pay-for-teachers dept.

jonboydev writes "I know there have been many postings on what kids should begin programming with, but I have a little different perspective: I am a software developer looking to help my brother, who is a high school teacher, develop a programming curriculum. The catch is that it is a class for all students to take, not just those interested in programming, and therefore will focus heavily on teaching problem solving. This class would follow after a class using Lego MindStorms, and we are planning on using Python. I'm sure many of you would agree that everyone can benefit from learning to program and any help would be greatly appreciated!"

9 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. How about Alice? by KingSkippus · · Score: 3, Informative

    Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this, so this isn't an endorsement, but...

    Have you considered taking a look at Alice? It's the free system worked on by the late Randy Pausch to teach programming without jumping straight into coding. From the site:

    Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games...By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

    1. Re:How about Alice? by BigMike1020 · · Score: 3, Informative

      My father teaches a college course using Alice. It's sort of a programming for non-computer-science majors class. I've sat down with him a couple of times and played with the program. I suspect that for someone who doesn't have any programming experience Alice is really fun (creating movies, making things move onscreen), but for someone with any experience its all just a hassle. Too many mouse clicks and drags are needed to get simple things done, and sometimes the natural-language style of the program isn't as natural-language as you want it to be.
      But if it's a free program it can't hurt to try it out yourself.

  2. Check out Scratch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Take a look at Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/

    It uses graphical blocks to create a stack of instructions. I have been amazed how easy it has been for middle school student to pick up on programming logic using this program.

  3. Re:BASIC or Pascal by Bruiser80 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I took a programming class in highschool. They used ThinkPascal on some old Macs. I was always upset how limited the program was - very limited graphical options. I could line trace, that was about it.

    That being said, the interface was very intuitive. Commands automatically were bolded and there were a lot of mandatory line breaks and tabbing which made it easy to figure out how deep into your loops you were.

    I don't code for a living. I write long equations in excel once in a while, but that's about it.

    The language isn't as important as the interface. Something with a pretty interface and intuitive commands is what's needed.

    --
    Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
  4. Processing by krilli · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://processing.org/

    Clean, quick, cross-platform, can do pretty wild things right out of the box.

    Make it fun, get them hooked.

    --
    Jag pratar lite svenska.
  5. In Soviet Amerika... by n6kuy · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...public school programs YOU!

    --
    If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
  6. Re:JavaScript? by msuarezalvarez · · Score: 2, Informative

    There is absolutely no need to teach about bits and bytes: they are only incidental in actual programming. Programming is reasoning about actions, evaluation and transformation. HTML and CSS simply do not help with that.

  7. squeak.org by sydbarrett74 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Take a look at Squeak -- it's targeted at younger children (elementary and junior-high) but versatile enough that high schoolers can probably get something out of it as well.

    --
    'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
  8. Re:Non sense. by Cytotoxic · · Score: 2, Informative

    Pfffeh.... nobody could work in multiple fields these days. I mean, really... sure, Linus Pauling won Nobel Prizes in 2 unrelated areas, and is a giant in both chemestry and biology, wrote textbooks on quantum physics and discovered the molecular cause of sickle cell anemia, built weapons AND was a renowned peace activist - Nobel peace prize and all ... but he died like in 1996 or something. Ancient history man...