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How To Teach Programming To Kids, Via XBox

Posted by timothy on from the if-it's-fun-it's-educational dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Chris Wilson reviews Kodu, the new XBox game that he calls 'Logo on Steroids.' The game allows you to build a world and program every object in it with an in-house graphical language, making the game a primitive example of 'reactive state machines' in a 'multi-agent concurrent system.' It sounds like what we call 'application specific integrated circuits' in engineering, where every line of code runs in parallel."

1 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. programming without typing? by davek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My first program was in 1991 on a TI-something:

    print hello

    this came with a syntax error. My second program was

    print "hello"

    And it worked. Over a decade later, I'm still programming. I'm not really convinced that "game" based programming systems do anything to inspire the young programmer. I say put them in front of a blinking cursor, the apt ones will just get it.

    --
    6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky