How To Teach a 12-Year-Old To Program?

thelordx writes "I've got a much younger brother who I'd like to teach how to program. When I was younger, you'd often start off with something like BASIC or Apple BASIC, maybe move on to Pascal, and eventually get to C and Java. Is something like Pascal still a dominant teaching language? I'd love to get low-level with him, and I firmly believe that C is the best language to eventually learn, but I'm not sure how to get him there. Can anyone recommend a language I can start to teach him that is simple enough to learn quickly, but powerful enough to do interesting things and lead him down a path towards C/C++?"

Comments

Re:Programming

[0xygen]

Interestingly along those lines someone has created a low-entry-barrier BASIC type language. Check out http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net/

Re:plain C, python, or ruby

[tomhudson]

IMHO everything is wrong with C as first language. It gives you dreadful programming style and is not a right tool for application programming. You can mod me as a troll if you want but you've got to chose the best tool for the job and C is a tool for writing operating systems for fuck's sake. It isn't even a high level language. All those buffer overflow security holes happen because of both typical "clever hack" C programming style and choice of using a language for writing operating systems to write business applications.

So teach him assembler as a first language, and EVERYTHING else will look simple in comparison!

Seriously, start him with either the java console (system.out stuff) so he can do "Hello, world!", or start him with html+javascript.

Programming today isn't like when we were kids. In those days, you did whole applications with ONE technology and ONE package - dbase, clipper, turbo c, delphi, dbfast ...

Now? The database is decoupled from the app logic. The app logic is decoupled from the presentation, which could be a program or a web app. We wanted separation of the storage from the logic from the front end, and we're there. The kid will get more fun doing simple web pages that he can see results in right away (important to get that positive feedback going, or he'll go back to his psp or wii or xbox or whatever). html+javascript gives him that, plus you don't need anything to start except a web browser and a text editor, - not even a web server.

Lego Mindstorms

[ebbe11]

It must be fun, otherwise he won't continue doing it. And building robots and making them do things is fun. But there is of course a price to pay - literally.