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Want To Get Kids Interested In Programming? Teach Them Computer History

Posted by timothy on from the nostalgia-works dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With poor IT teaching putting kids off pursuing a career in the computing it is time to look for a new approach. Taking kids back to the time of computing pioneers like John Von Neumann and the first machines — the likes of the Z3, the Eniac and the Colossus — would both inspire them and help get over the fundamentals about how computers work, argues silicon.com."

2 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Frankly... by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But those paper magazines surely had a low data capacity.

    . . . as opposed to new socially networking twittering systems that have high data capacity but low information content.

    --
    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
  2. Re:Yea... teach them history... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    EXACTLY! The way to get kids interested in programming is to encourage curiosity -- give them the code to a simple video game (tetris? Space invaders?) and let them tinker with it.
    Nibble & Byte magazines used to list page-after-page of source code for Apple][ games. Typing that in, debugging the inevitable mistakes, etc. are good practice! Or show them the amazing old BeagleBros. 2-liner programs.