I remember when I first became interested in programming in early high school/late middle school. It was when someone showed me their IT-83 calculator that had a program on it to compute the quadratic formula by just giving it the variables.
Some of you may regard this as encouraging cheating, but besides using it on a test if you were to spend the time to make a program to perform some equation you should have a better than average understanding of the equation itself.
The reason this is such a good place to start is that it shows how useful programming can be and it gives someone real problems to work on it that seem easy, but pose their own problems that the programmer will need to figure out.
(Dont have to program these on a calculator, you could use your favorite "easier" to learn language)
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I remember when I first became interested in programming in early high school/late middle school. It was when someone showed me their IT-83 calculator that had a program on it to compute the quadratic formula by just giving it the variables. Some of you may regard this as encouraging cheating, but besides using it on a test if you were to spend the time to make a program to perform some equation you should have a better than average understanding of the equation itself. The reason this is such a good place to start is that it shows how useful programming can be and it gives someone real problems to work on it that seem easy, but pose their own problems that the programmer will need to figure out. (Dont have to program these on a calculator, you could use your favorite "easier" to learn language)