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?"

Scratch

[dabadab]

Scratch is localizable, it's actually running in Hungarian on my Debian desktop. Looking at /usr/share/scratch/locale, it's already translated to over 40 languages.

Re: Scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

Available Scratch languages [mit.edu]

Help translate [mit.edu] Scratch into other languages.

Khan academy's platform

[cool_akshay]

Khan Academy's programming tutorials use some kind of visual programming platform. I think its worth checking out. It starts of with programming the movement of the ball. The language is English. But as it is intended to teach programming with fun, this might be the one. I had tried it with my 12 year old bother and it worked. Here is the link : https://www.khanacademy.org/cs/paddle-ball/830543654 [khanacademy.org]

To switch languages in Scratch...

[girlinatrainingbra]

It's very easy to switch the locale in Scratch even while running scratch. Click on the left-most icon (a wire-frame globe icon) at the top-left, and that will allow you to select the language to use.
:>)
Danish a.k.a. Dansk [wikipedia.org], is already a supported language in Scratch [wikipedia.org], as are 49 other languages as shown at http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Languages [mit.edu]

Re:Stop

[ozmanjusri]

I've been teaching my nephews coding and robotics with Minibloq http://blog.minibloq.org/ [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.

Re:The only way to do it

[Melkman]

And there is a visual programming environment for squeak especially geared towards kids with localization in many languages. It's called Etoys (http://www.squeakland.org/). You can also link it to an Arduino or Mindstorm for real world interaction with Physical Etoys (http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/projects/physical-etoys/). It's what my kids use ;-).

Re:Logo

[mrthoughtful]

"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.

Re:Stop

[KGIII]

I am not sure why but this is actually in my favorites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programming_languages [wikipedia.org]

Some research there may help too. I don't have anything of value (beyond said link) to add to this conversation really.