Localized (Visual) Programming Language For Kids? 185
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Available Scratch languages [mit.edu]
Help translate [mit.edu] Scratch into other languages.
To switch languages in Scratch... (Score:5, Informative)
:>)
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]
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Then what the heck are all those field hands speaking??? No wonder they look at me funny. Well, that and my face.
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This. Scratch is already localized in Dutch and Danish. Even the Scratch website is localized in Dutch.
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http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/12/why-your-8-year-old-should-be-coding/ [venturebeat.com]
I don't know if it's been localised anywhere but may appeal. The link is a question but the article is about an online product.
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Exactly :)
The only way to do it (Score:4, Interesting)
Kay worked at just that, at Xerox PARC. It was not visual, but let's be honest here; Xerox fscking PARC.
You should check this out:
http://squeak.org/About/ [squeak.org]
No... It is better.
Re:The only way to do it (Score:5, Informative)
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 ;-).
Logo (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as I know most dialects of Logo are localized or localizable, both keywords and variables. But I don't know its domain (a drawing turtle) is interesting to your daughter.
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When I was 8 we used a localized version of Logo at school, and indeed it was interesting at that time. Today's standards might be higher, though.
Re:Logo (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
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Logo is a horrible language to start with because it doesn't trust you with responsibility. You are stuck in a la-la-land where the only thing you can do is draw pretty pictures. Beginning programmers, and even children, want to be trusted with responsibility, and feel like they are in control of their environment. So I suggest avoiding pedagogical languages and instead opt for practical languages [shlomifish.org].
When I took a graduate-level multi-agent systems course at my university, the language we used to implement algorithms we were finding in current research paper on the topic was netlogo. You can do a lot more than draw pretty pictures, and the language is used fairly heavily in certain research fields.
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Logo is a horrible language to start with because it doesn't trust you with responsibility. You are stuck in a la-la-land where the only thing you can do is draw pretty pictures.
Absolute nonsense. There's a lot more to logo than that! Perhaps you should learn something about a language before you make outrageously incompetent pronouncements like this in the future?
I'll warn other users away from the pedagogically unsound article on your website as well.
Scratch is still your best bet. (Score:4, Insightful)
Lego Midstorm (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know if it's localized, but Lego Mindstorm should do the trick. Rather expensive solution though.
Re:Lego Midstorm (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know if it's localized, but Lego Mindstorm should do the trick. Rather expensive solution though.
Why is this modded funny?
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because they think it's a toy? well it is a toy but you can do some cool tricks with it like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF0pMILT7_Y [youtube.com]
it's expensive though and I don't think that it solves the language "problem".. I don't think it's a problem though, learning computers and learning english is something that just goes hand in hand.
Just "Learn English" (Score:1, Insightful)
.. no programming language requires you to "learn English", they require you to know a handful of keywords.
Also, at 8 years old, they should already know English or start learning it anyways, it's a language pretty much everyone on the planet will need and the earlier you start learning it the easier it will be for you to learn it properly.
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Yeah, I would expect kids who speak Dutch and Danish (particularly Danish) to speak English relatively well as a second language. Strange that it would "put her off".
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Prob is, Dutch and Danish are cute "local" languages. She's gonna have to learn English, so better do it now while she's a kid and can handle it.
Perl FTW! (Score:5, Funny)
:>)
The ability of Perl [wikipedia.org] to mystify, astound, and obfuscate is so reknowned that there is even a contest dedicated to the ability of Perl to render unintelligible code:
Used properly, Perl can become a "write-only" programming language, such that no one else can decipher what you are attempting to do.
;>)
Just kidding. I am actually a fan of Perl, Python, C, C++, BASIC, Lisp, and Scheme. I hear good things about Logo and the turtle languages all allow keywords to be in any language. Just because the token for printing in BASIC is usually the english word "PRINT", there is no reason for it to be constrained to that. In the TRS-80, "PRINT" is retokenized as the question-mark symbol "?" which can also be used as a short-cut for the "PRINT" statement. My first programming language was BASIC (Level 1 basic) on the TRS-80 with 4K (4 kilobytes!!!) of memory. I am sorry that your daughter is turned off by the english language. Get your hands on a BASIC interpreter and change the interpreter for the keywords which you'd prefer. Or stick with Scratch as recommended above.
.
Also, Lisp and Scheme are fairly cryptic and language agnostic, though parenthesis heavy: car, cdr, eval, print (damn, that last word is obviously english.) Good luck!
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My first programming language was BASIC (Level 1 basic) on the TRS-80 with 4K (4 kilobytes!!!) of memory.
Heh... The Trash 80!
I learned BASIC on a PET, upgraded to a VIC 20, and then I spent a summer pounding away on a friend's TRS-80 II (or III maybe, we're talking 30 years ago so my brain is a bit fuzzy) and that made me decide to get a TRS-80 4. I remember regretting purchasing it and not waiting a while longer. If I'd waited I probably would have ended up with an Amiga (1000 or 2000, again, I can't really remember because it was a lot of years ago) which was a much nicer computer - you could even multitask.
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English, Bad English , Canadian and American English.
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Bad English! *wags finger* No participle for you!
*sighs*
I'm not even sorry for that.
Re:Just "Learn English" (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd rather learn a new language at 8 than at 48... just saying, its probably a very good thing to teach her English right now than have her struggle to learn it later (apparently kids are much more adaptable to language, starting off with nothing and having to learn 1 it kind of makes sense somehow)
All my Danish friends say that they all speak English anyway, 5 million Danes on the planet and no-one else speaks Danish makes it almost mandatory for them to speak something else, and Danish is a close common ancestor of English anyway (ie I really don't speak Danish, but I can understand the meaning of danish text) having its roots in the settlement era of the dark ages when you guys came over in the longships.
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Having just learned Danish myself, when I suddenly need to switch to English, a sort of Dutch-Danish version of English comes out of my mouth. And you can just see people thinking "what century did he just arrive from (riding his
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You are wrong in that it matters (Score:4, Insightful)
I learned programming long before knowing english. It doesn't make any difference, keywords are just symbols you have to understand what they do. The fact that 'for' stands for an english word doesn't mean a non-programmer can look at the source code and see what 'for' does or the implications it has.
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The fact that 'for' stands for an english word doesn't mean a non-programmer can look at the source code and see what 'for' does or the implications it has.
A Dutch speaker shouldn't have too much trouble with the word "for" - it's spelled a little differently, but pronounced almost exactly the same as its Dutch equivalent "voor".
BASIC (Score:2)
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Similar experience here but I started out with a cheat sheet that someone gave me, that got me going for a while. I remember the joy of getting a copy of QBasic, and not have to prefix every line with a line number.
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I remember that joy... then the next was QuickBASIC being able to compile to an EXE... it was a huge step to be able to run things without the QBASIC interface. At least for a young kid.
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Khan academy's platform (Score:3, Informative)
GvR is a great place to start (Score:3)
GvR is a great platform to learn programming. It teaches loops and conditionals and problem solving. It is written in Python so will work cross platform. The only negative is that I think it is not localised.
http://gvr.sourceforge.net/index.php [sourceforge.net]
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Great suggestion for a localised programming language there, then.
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He said "Or one that I can localise myself" It is written in Python, he could easily localise it himself...
Lego Mindstorm (Score:5, Interesting)
Lego Mindstorm might be a nice approach. It's available both in Dutch and Danish, and uses a graphical language with a great graphical interface dedicated to kids. I use it to teach (Dutch) programing and robotics to kids and it's amazing easy for them to make and modify the software.
The main drawbacks is that, although the software is free, you need to get a 200€ lego robot to make it useful. It also has only a Windows (and probably Mac) version. IMHO, the robot has the advantage to bring additional interest to the kids. It makes programming much less abstract.
To try the software before buying, look for the lego mindstorm nxt 2 iso on the lego website (it's a bit hidden).
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Oh, I didn't know it was available in Danish.
I've used the NeXT (or nExt, NexT, or whatever their crazy capitalization is) for an introduction to control theory for engineering students at the university. It's a great way to quickly hobble together a prototype in Lego and some prototype software and watch it in action, and thereby get them motivated to learn a bit of theory.
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Piet (Score:2)
You should teach her English (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi,
I may be dismissed as an imperialistic pig for saying that, but I've written on why it is important to avoid localised programming languages [shlomifish.org] because it is becoming more and more important to learn English as soon as possible. Just for the record, English is not my mother language (I am Israeli and my mother language is Hebrew), and yet I think that learning English is an increasingly important skill, and also communicate primarily in English in my Internet interactions, and most of home-site [shlomifish.org] and blogs are written in English. Whether you like it or not, I believe English has been becoming what Aramaic was in the Near East [shlomifish.org] from the time of the Neo-Babylonian Empire [wikipedia.org] up to Arab times.
I suggest you invest the time in teaching your daughter English first, which is of far greater utility than programming, and is also absolutely necessary for learning to program (or for most other fields of science, technology and endeavour).
Lingua Franca (Score:2)
"Lingua Franca" [wikipedia.org]
No need to bring up Aramaic when we have a perfectly good term for the concept.
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and you don't need to be able to read to be a good cook.
sure opens new horizons though.
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As another imperialist pig who's not a native English speaker (Romanian in this case), I strongly recommend getting her used to the English keywords. :)
An important part of learning programming is going through documentation on your own, and most documentation worth a damn is in English.
Mind, i first started with machine code/assembly language when i was 10-ish, and that has no connection with any language known by humans
Why not Scratch? (Score:2)
There are many localized version of Scratch available already, including Dutch.
If the localization is incomplete, I understand that Scratch is easily localizable.
http://scratchweb.nl/ [scratchweb.nl]
http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=81477 [mit.edu]
Play with them (Score:5, Interesting)
If your kids are strongly visual, and want to work with graphics manipulation, then Scratch is ok. If they like robotics and want to work in the real world, then Lego mindstorms is alright (for simple projects) both choices the kids will be involved in as much non-programming as coding - as design (2d or 3d) will absorb their time.
Logo is a pure programming language, which is going to encourage good application design, but it's really important to find a good guide for them - it's also nice (but not necessary by any means) if you can find a turtle. At education college we were encouraged to teach logo, and it was a position that I agree on. The only potential issue is that it is not 'C'-like but that's a syntax issue.
There are also programming games which help develop Logo skills - not computer games - family games - such as you being a robot, and asking the kids to give you orders to do something - you can give them a starting lexicon of very few commands, and ask them to take you to the kitchen. Note that angles are often best addressed with quarter-turns: left, right, turn-around, etc. Then later on introduce something like 'bit-left' or 'little-left'. So a lexicon of forward,back,left,right,stop is often a good start. Then parameterising forward: eg forward 50..
The primary advantages are that they get time to have fun with their Dad, (and you with them) and you can design the language fluidly according to their ability. Later on you can easily add function definitions using eg "to": eg. "Dad, to square, repeat 4 times forward 5 right"
AFAIK none of them have very good debugging tools, and IMO debugging is where most early coders find out if they have enough stamina to want to code, so games like above help you to give suggestions. Likewise, with logo (turtle graphics) - at first anyway- you can act out the programme which can help.
Logo isn't just graphics - it's a simplified form of lisp.
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Have a look at http://education.mit.edu/projects/starlogo-tng [mit.edu]
It's available in English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Greek - so it should be localizable - certainly for latin-based languages.
I'm unaffiliated..
Kudo (Score:2)
Rocky's Boots! (Score:2)
n/t
x86 Assembly Language (Score:2)
I would recommend teaching her x86 Assembly Language.
The instructions are simple little things like MOV, PUSH, POP, CALL, and INT. She can and should comment heavily and that can be in any language.
The mnemonics come from English, but are abstracted enough that they shouldn't turn her off for language's sake.
The concepts are basic as well. What she learns now will always be relevant. Consider this:
[...] a design architecture for an electronic digital computer with subdivisions of a processing unit consis
LISP / Scheme? (Score:2)
Kodu (Score:2)
You might want to look at Kodu [microsoft.com]. There are plenty of reasons to hate on it, but it's a visual programming language aimed at making games.
Learn English (Score:2)
Seriously. Most jobs in the programming industry (including offshore consulting) have customers and partners who use English for documentation, requirements, and code. While it may be "neat" to program in another language, if you try to do so in the real world, you're probably going to get spanked and told to use "comprehensible names in your code."
I realize that might sound bigoted, saying you have to learn English to program, but it's a simple fact of the modern world. The user interface for applica
Hmm two options (Score:2)
Logo: http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/logo/programming.html [mit.edu]
Turing: http://compsci.ca/holtsoft/ [compsci.ca]
I found them pretty good back in the day.
Sugar (Score:2)
More than just Scratch, why not the full Sugar experience? You can put it in a usb stick [sugarlabs.org] or put it as an alternate desktop manager if you already use linux. Here in Uruguay (where the language is spanish) is what school kids get with the project Ceibal [wikipedia.org], and that includes, already localized, Logo (TurtleArt) and Scratch.
And don't focus on programming, at least at the start. Trying to do animations in drawings will be enough motivation for them to understand the basics of programming while they have fun.
Check out Stencyl (Score:2)
It uses a visual programming language that is based on Scratch (although not one-for-one). It's gained some attention from educators and has been used by all age ranges (and commercial developers as well). Better yet, you can use it completely for free (if you don't mind a preloader splash screen) to export to Flash - which means easy sharing and playing of the games over the internet. If you want, subscript
localize the documentation, not the keywords (Score:2)
You need a localized description of things. This could be just a book, or it could be something in the editor. It would help to have tooltip-style explanations of keywords and library functions. It would help to have a localized menu showing things that make sense in the current context. Go beyond the supposed English. Explain the operators. For example, the '*' as a pointer reference is surely not English.
JavaScript in Unity game engine (Score:2)
It'll seem a little counter-intuitive, but I strongly recommend JavaScript in the Unity game engine for a lotta reasons.
The problem with most visual programming languages is that they don't transition well to written languages, which you start to pine for after getting sick of dragging the output of one module to the input of another for the 300th time. You want this just for laziness/productivity reasons, and it also happens to be a good way to get her motivated to learn English faster.
So here's my thinki
Kid's neural structure is different (Score:2)
Just be sure to be patient with your kids when you are teaching them logic. Humans (all humans) suck at logical naturally, but they REALLY suck when their brains are developing. Remember how learning basic math was challenging? It wasn't challenging simply because you hadn't seen math before. Your brain was not as equipped as it is in adulthood to deal with logic.
You may find that your kid takes a long time to pick up certain concepts, fails completely to pick up other concepts, while they pick up still oth
love for kturtle (Score:2)
Perhaps more basic than what you're looking for, but I've been having a lot of fun with my 5 & 6 year old with KTurtle. It's a Logo based drawing program where you have only a few basic commands to make the turtle draw stuff. It has variables, loops, functions and conditionals; not to mention graph coordinates, polygons, etc. It's also localisable... which is really cool.
To start the kid out I basically would make little programs that make shapes or patterns, and he'd then mess around with them... mostl
Re:Stop (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even if they don't make a carrier somewhere in IT, coding skills come in handy in many other carrier choices and is highly valued. Even more important, being exposed to programming teaches other valuable skills, and improves logical thinking and organization.
Re:Stop (Score:5, Informative)
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:Stop (Score:4, Interesting)
I taught myself programming when I was about 10 years old and I'm not a native English speaker and my language is written in non-latin characters. I can tell you how I did it but many of you are not going to like it:
I started with BASIC in the pre-structured era. I wrote stuff like this:
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 SOUND 512 5
(forgive if syntax is wrong)
I spent a lot of time drawing pictures and making music without knowing anything about conditionals or loops. Then I graduated to GOTO, which in retrospect was a lot easier to understand for a 10 year old than a structured conditional block or a loop.
When I finally started with structured programming languages, making the transition took only a little time. If I had started with it at age 10, it might have overwhelmed me. The explicit representation of sequence (the line labels), conditions and iteration (the GOTO) was easier for me to understand as a kid. Especially since my English was very limited back then.
Plus I never bothered with math (I hadn't learned to love it yet). As I said, I drew pictures and made music with the PC speaker (so I was using only a few functions built into the language). Maybe that's an approach to think about, for starters.
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This is a different age though, and that coolness factor (of a ZX-
Re:Stop (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:I learned C when I was a kid. (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps, and after all, these boys have other failings as well.
Their musical skills are below par, they're absolutely useless at bricklaying and carpentry, and they suck at brewing and winemaking. I've suggested to my sister-in-law that she sell them off to vivisectionists and start again, but she's hesitant.
Do you have any arguments that might convince her?
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Jumping straight into C isn't such a good idea. Specially for an 8 year old kid. Pointers? When you have only been doing basic math for a couple of years?
Let them understand the logic, and then you can switch them to something more advanced. Just make sure they don't stay on a broken training-wheels language like basic past the age of 12.
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First, watch this http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html [ted.com]
Second, C is a good idea.
Always teach the peanut butter robot exercise first. write out the steps for a robot to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
And when the kids skip a step, you get to stump them with "HOW?" They will soon understand programming at its core as a set of instructions.
When a kid wants to know how to solve a particular problem, they're going to learn the maths necessary. Unless they don't have
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When a kid wants to know how to solve a particular problem, they're going to learn the maths necessary.
Indeed. That was my experience with my younger brother, around 10 at the time. I showed him a simple reversi (aka Othello) game I had coded in python, with just a simple text representation of the board, fully expecting him, accustomed to 3D games with colorful graphics and all that, to dismiss it inmediately. Not the case. He was so amazed that you could do that, and intrigued by the how, he didn't care for the trivial UI or the English keywords (which he barely understands) in the non-graphical code.
So my
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Kids who started with other programming languages doesn't seem to get that problem.
That's because they only used languages without pointers. If they used Pascal (that does have pointers but they are not nearly as useful there as in C) they would be more confused than with C.
It's just a memory address.
No.
Pointer value is an address that is assumed to be a location of a variable of a type that the pointer type refers to. This is important for pointer arithmetics, relationship between arrays and pointers, type safety, and allowing/disallowing/tracking data modifications (with const, restrict and volatile qualifiers th
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Would it be better to say that the pointer is a beginning memory address, but that one needs to know the ending address (or the byte past it) as well?
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Then it sounds like you don't understand the term "pointer" either. To summarize a bit, a pointer is usually of a size (number of bits) that is a native size for the hardware at hand, and could be as much as 256 bits in currently working hardware, but typically 64 bits in consumer hardware.
Secondly, it is considered to be (usually) a pointer, which if used as a memory address to be read, would result in the reading of the data at that address.
But there are nuances to what you do with that data, because its
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Then it sounds like you don't understand the term "pointer" either. To summarize a bit, a pointer is usually of a size (number of bits) that is a native size for the hardware at hand, and could be as much as 256 bits in currently working hardware, but typically 64 bits in consumer hardware.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I didn't mean the ending address of the machine; I meant the ending address of the variable.
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Where I am talking about the address of the data, which may actually live in any address the hardware can access. So you still aren't fully grokking the concept.
And I am sad because I can't seem to explain it any better.
Cheers, Gene
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But for a particular variable, don't the bytes have to be consecutive? If I have a pointer to an eight-byte struct, the actual address is the first of eight consecutive bytes. The machine size doesn't matter. If I have an array of such structs, then the next pointer should be the previous pointer plus eight.
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Yes, that is the generally accepted practice, diddled only by the endian-ness of the processor.
Personally I have trouble with big endian hardware, but that's just me. There is no reason it can't work just as well as long as the compiler knows about it. But what little programming I do today is both on smaller cpu's, and in assembly. Or for stuff on this linux box, a bash script seems to work well too.
Cheers, Gene
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I don't agree. It seems like your'e just talking past one another. You think he doesn't understand because you're misunderstanding his posts.
Pointers aren't a difficult concept, though it's easy to slip in to less than precise terms when talking about them, which is what I see happening here.
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That is also a possibility. A language barrier of sorts.
I am reminded of a phrase I saw years ago, that said England and America were two great countries, separated by a common language. ;-)
Cheers, Gene
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A pointer IS just a memory address, but in C it also has a type associated (e.g. a pointer of type int* holds the address of an integer). This extra type information defines the size of the value found at that memory address, which may be significantly different from the size of the pointer (32 or 64 bits typically). Incrementing a pointer increases the address by the size of the destination, not by 1.
While I didn't mention types, I did say that one needed to know the end address. That may not have been the
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True, but the size should be enough to know the address of the byte just past the variable..
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When you get around to explaining how randomness like this works:
int c = 65;
int *b =
char *a = (char *)b;
printf("a is %c\n", (char)*a);
You start realizing that the way pointers are done in C is really odd, and only seems to be normal to those who've used it so long that they've learned the semantics.
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why C pointers are difficult (Score:2)
I can think of several reasons. The first is that the pointer usage operator and the pointer generation operator go on the opposite side relative to the array usage operator and the function usage operator. That is, '*' and '&' are prefix operators but '[]' and '()' are postfix operators. (BTW, casting also ought to match)
The stack is kind of cruel. You can take the address of a stack item, save it away, and then later find that bad stuff happens when you use the pointer. You never called free() on the
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There is a lot to learn from C.
On the other hand, C is full of undefined behaviour.
As such, C regularly kicks newbies in the teeth.
Better to learn a language that doesn't have undefined behaviour.
Re: Stop (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with doing things right the first time is that nobody appreciates just how damn difficult it was.
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> > Stop pushing your line of work down her throat.
> Agreed. The last thing the STEM field needs is an influx of people thinking our careers require no self-sacrifice and aptitude.
Self-sacrifice and even an 'aptitude' towards most things, can be developed by parents in the vast majority of children. E.g., the Polgar and Williams sisters.
What GP really needs is to stop pushing _his_ ideology down the parent's throat.
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Actually, I don't believe they asked you if you thought it a bit foolish. So as to avoid this in the future could you say specifically why you think that would be foolish?
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You don't have to actually KNOW dutch to answer his question for him, and there are far more english-only geeks than dutch-speaking geek, so asking in english is THE best way to get the most high quality answers.
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Why not use the time to learn English first. It will be more useful to her than programming.
Learning a whole language first isn't much fun. Also, lots of people I know (me included) learned programming first, then (through programming) english. I started with GW-BASIC at age of 7 and almost everything was in english: the programs I had, even the manuals. I picked up basic english from this (after some trial and error you understand what certain words or phrases mean; I was pretty surprised when I learned at school that these words are pronounced totally differently than I imagined ;-)
I even kne
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Lies.
The balloon program is just 16 lines, and expanding it to the full version as presented in the book it's just 25 lines. :(
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There were no actual grammar problems, just punctuation mistakes. The word immediately preceding your two examples should have been followed by a comma instead of a period.
Punctuation, especially commas, is hard even for native english speakers.