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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."

3 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Just say NO to Logo on steriods by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Your turtle shrinks.

  2. Re:This isn't programming. by FiveDozenWhales · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's elementary programming--as TFA states, you define rules for the behavior of objects and the interactions between objects.

    While this certainly isn't as nitty-gritty as Logo, it still introduces kids to the ideas of determining conditions, and processes to undergo under those conditions, a very important concept in programming. It also introduces them to an object-oriented environment.

    Maybe it doesn't "teach programming to kids," but with any luck it will get them interested and excited enough about this kind of thing to pursue it academically... and maybe even give them a very basic foundation of skills.

  3. 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