I'm going to shift gears here and come at it from the marketing point of view.
Downloading the emulator does solve the environment issue for folks who have enough experience for understanding emulators. Kids who are going to try to learn programming for the first time aren't going to download the emulator, their somewhat experienced mom or dad will.
So who do we really want to address? Kids in general reguardless of the skill level of their parents, or kids who have a parent who know that Python isn't a Sci-Fi channel show about 100ft snakes:)
Once you have the emulator, you still have to have the workbook. I think the workbook is the most important thing...reguardless of the emulator or language. Teaching newer concepts is smart, but you have to do it with the 10 year old kid in mind who doesn't have developers for parents.
I have a couple books from way back. I'll date myself here, but one I had for basic programming was Gortek and the microchips for the Vic 20.
My parents didn't know a darn thing about computers but thought I should have one and I'm glad they did.
Here is my last thought. It may be underway already, but how about an opensource project for a workbook covered under GPL. The project would have links to all the required binaries and would walk kids through basic exercises written like a story with problems to solve using the language. Now that I have said this, I think this would be a very dificult to actually do. Because, you would need more than crack programmers, you would need artists and children's book authors too. Not the kind of folks you find at sourceforge typically.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to shift gears here and come at it from the marketing point of view. Downloading the emulator does solve the environment issue for folks who have enough experience for understanding emulators. Kids who are going to try to learn programming for the first time aren't going to download the emulator, their somewhat experienced mom or dad will. So who do we really want to address? Kids in general reguardless of the skill level of their parents, or kids who have a parent who know that Python isn't a Sci-Fi channel show about 100ft snakes :)
Once you have the emulator, you still have to have the workbook. I think the workbook is the most important thing...reguardless of the emulator or language. Teaching newer concepts is smart, but you have to do it with the 10 year old kid in mind who doesn't have developers for parents.
I have a couple books from way back. I'll date myself here, but one I had for basic programming was Gortek and the microchips for the Vic 20.
My parents didn't know a darn thing about computers but thought I should have one and I'm glad they did.
Here is my last thought. It may be underway already, but how about an opensource project for a workbook covered under GPL. The project would have links to all the required binaries and would walk kids through basic exercises written like a story with problems to solve using the language. Now that I have said this, I think this would be a very dificult to actually do. Because, you would need more than crack programmers, you would need artists and children's book authors too. Not the kind of folks you find at sourceforge typically.