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Localized (Visual) Programming Language For Kids?
First time accepted submitter jimshatt writes "I want my kids to play around with programming languages. To teach them basic concepts like loops and subroutines and the likes. My 8-year-old daughter in particular. I've tried Scratch and some other visual languages, but I think she might be turned off by the English language. Having to learn English as well as a programming language at the same time might be just a little too much.
I'd really like to have a programming language that is easy to learn, and localized or localizable. Preferably cross-platform, or browser-based, so she can show her work at school (Windows) as well as work on in at home (Debian Linux).
By the way, she speaks Dutch and Danish, so preferably one of those languages (but if it's localizable I can translate it myself).
Any suggestions?"
Lego Mindstorm might be a nice approach. It's available both in Dutch and Danish, and uses a graphical language with a great graphical interface dedicated to kids. I use it to teach (Dutch) programing and robotics to kids and it's amazing easy for them to make and modify the software.
The main drawbacks is that, although the software is free, you need to get a 200€ lego robot to make it useful. It also has only a Windows (and probably Mac) version. IMHO, the robot has the advantage to bring additional interest to the kids. It makes programming much less abstract.
To try the software before buying, look for the lego mindstorm nxt 2 iso on the lego website (it's a bit hidden).
I've been teaching my nephews coding and robotics with Minibloq http://blog.minibloq.org/. They love being able to see their code happen in the real world, with lights, buzzers and motors to control.
The hard part is getting them to stop!
There are French, Bahasa and Spanish versions available, and it should be simple to add Dutch and/or Danish.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Hi,
I may be dismissed as an imperialistic pig for saying that, but I've written on why it is important to avoid localised programming languages because it is becoming more and more important to learn English as soon as possible. Just for the record, English is not my mother language (I am Israeli and my mother language is Hebrew), and yet I think that learning English is an increasingly important skill, and also communicate primarily in English in my Internet interactions, and most of home-site and blogs are written in English. Whether you like it or not, I believe English has been becoming what Aramaic was in the Near East from the time of the Neo-Babylonian Empire up to Arab times.
I suggest you invest the time in teaching your daughter English first, which is of far greater utility than programming, and is also absolutely necessary for learning to program (or for most other fields of science, technology and endeavour).
We have two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we read. http://www.shlomifish.org/
"The only thing you can do is draw pretty pictures" That is just not true.
Although it's initial purpose was to create a math land where kids could play with words and sentences, Logo was most often taught via turtle graphics - which provided a set of visual cues to understand the nature of the underlying structures of languages such as the stack and program counters and also helped to develop debugging skills. Likewise the fact that recursion is Logo's preferred processing paradigm is, IMO, quite remarkable.
Logo's initial weaknesses were to do with an absence of concurrency and limited IO. Modern variants such as StarLogo and NetLogo address many of those issues and are used to examine emergent systems and AI.
Scratch runs on Squeak, a variant of Smalltalk, which was inspired by Logo, which itself is a dialect of Lisp.
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