I agree. Start him out with something like Scratch from MIT. It's programming with trainning wheels, and it does a wonderful job of encouraging your programmers and introducing the basic concepts. Rather than writing code, they drag and drop possible commands from a menu. I used it to teach upcoming 6th-8th graders the basics of programming this summer. All it took was a 3 minute introduction and they were off.
As they were ready (the next day), I gave them introductions to variables, and calling commands in other "sprites" (objects), and they took each step and ran with it.
The biggest drawback to Scratch is that it does use some pretty big trainning wheels and does not use traditional programming terminology. When he becomes proficient in it, before moving on to an actual language, you may want to introduce him to Carnegie Mellon's Alice programming language. Same idea as Scratch - drag and drop programming that helps you learn the concepts, but Alice is more of a real bike with small trainning wheels than a tricycle. It allows a lot more freedom and is powerful enough to handle arrays, and true OOP.
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That's awesome. Such a cool cutting edge thing for schools to do. Recent data has shown that heart rate monitored aerobic PE can boost help grades, decrease discipline problems, mediate learning disabilities, make kids enjoy PE more because they compete against themselves, and lead to a lifetime of exercise. Check out Spark by John Rately - he's a leading child psychiatrist: http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-Brain/dp/0316113506/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253071843&sr=8-1
I agree. Start him out with something like Scratch from MIT. It's programming with trainning wheels, and it does a wonderful job of encouraging your programmers and introducing the basic concepts. Rather than writing code, they drag and drop possible commands from a menu. I used it to teach upcoming 6th-8th graders the basics of programming this summer. All it took was a 3 minute introduction and they were off. As they were ready (the next day), I gave them introductions to variables, and calling commands in other "sprites" (objects), and they took each step and ran with it. The biggest drawback to Scratch is that it does use some pretty big trainning wheels and does not use traditional programming terminology. When he becomes proficient in it, before moving on to an actual language, you may want to introduce him to Carnegie Mellon's Alice programming language. Same idea as Scratch - drag and drop programming that helps you learn the concepts, but Alice is more of a real bike with small trainning wheels than a tricycle. It allows a lot more freedom and is powerful enough to handle arrays, and true OOP.
I visited the LIGO site in Louisiana over 5 years ago: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/ Built in 1999: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/LIGO_web/PR/scripts/fa cts.html