I agree.
Im a high school science teacher taking a year 7 Gifted and Talented (now refered to as GAT) class next year. Im planning to use Freebasic. Its purely awesome for this sort of stuff. A real gateway language that lets students use C libraries, OpenGL, DirectX but also allows them to line, pset, circle.
Given our year 11 and 12 IT classes have to use Visual Basic, it gets them into the basic syntax with out clunky Visual stuff getting in the way.
11-14, Forget OOP and all that other crud. You want proceedural, you want simple, you want stuff kids can pick up and do something useful very quickly. And squeezing programming into a science lesson, thats what I want. I don't want kids to write up some pseudo code, get it approved, then write a nice neat anal C code. I want quick and dirty like in the real world cause I've got 45 minutes to get them to complete a task from bell to bell.
Well that crosses that off my list, but I also have to teach them Databases! SQL as well then?... Somewhere after that I just have to fit in maths and maybe, just maybe a whole entire Science sylabus...
Basic is no longer the programming poison is once was.
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I agree. Im a high school science teacher taking a year 7 Gifted and Talented (now refered to as GAT) class next year. Im planning to use Freebasic. Its purely awesome for this sort of stuff. A real gateway language that lets students use C libraries, OpenGL, DirectX but also allows them to line, pset, circle. Given our year 11 and 12 IT classes have to use Visual Basic, it gets them into the basic syntax with out clunky Visual stuff getting in the way. 11-14, Forget OOP and all that other crud. You want proceedural, you want simple, you want stuff kids can pick up and do something useful very quickly. And squeezing programming into a science lesson, thats what I want. I don't want kids to write up some pseudo code, get it approved, then write a nice neat anal C code. I want quick and dirty like in the real world cause I've got 45 minutes to get them to complete a task from bell to bell. Well that crosses that off my list, but I also have to teach them Databases! SQL as well then?... Somewhere after that I just have to fit in maths and maybe, just maybe a whole entire Science sylabus... Basic is no longer the programming poison is once was.