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Education Programming IT Technology

Teaching Programming Skills to Children? 121

Posted by Cliff from the getting-them-hooked-at-an-early-age dept.
KlaatuVN asks: "My younger siblings are asking for ways to learn to program. If I remember correctly, when I was younger I started programming by writing games like 'Lemonade Stand' in BASIC for the Commodore 64. Short of finding a Commodore 64 emulator and digging up some old BASIC programming books somewhere, what do you think is a good way of teaching children to program? I'm not trying to start a 'language war', but that does enter into it. Should I start with a scripting language? What, O Wise Slashdot Readers, are your opinions?" When I was just starting out in computers, I remember LOGO being a big help in teaching me the logic skills I would eventually use as a programmer. I know LOGO is still around, but it would be interesting to note if there are other similar projects like it. What tools, and programs would you use to teach programming skills to interested youngsters?
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Teaching Programming Skills to Children? More

Teaching Programming Skills to Children?

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  • QuickBASIC is easy to use and there's less of the problems associated with API's with it. If you don't mind the lack of legality about it, there are copies on the net. QuickBASIC [google.com]

    • Re:QuickBASIC (Score:2, Informative)

      by murat ( 262137 )
      Depends on the age. For younger children I'd teach Visual Basic instead of QuickBasic. For older ones, I'd start with C.
      • Best Language = English. By the time they grow up, the IT sector will be so friggin' saturated with plain jane programmers that he'd probably wanna be flippin' burgers instead because it pays better. Thats probably what I'll be forced to do anyways. And I've been doing this junk since I was 8 (I'm 23 now in case your wondering).
      • I'd never teach Visual Basic to anybody who never programmed before. I took my first programming class in VB, and we spent more time customizing objects and labels and textboxes and such, and not enough time programming. Folks should just get used to using a console for I/O before they endure the trouble of making a GUI.

        I first learned programming on QBASIC and AppleBASIC, but I really got the bug when I started programming in "TI BASIC", or the BASIC that's included with TI graphing calculators. The la
    • Please don't teach children _any_ dialect of Basic.
      Start them with Logo and then move them up to Python. Ucblogo is free and available for Linux and probably the *BSDs.
      • I started with Basic when I was 9, and I turned out fine. But my mother encouraged me to master as many languages as I could as they became available to me, so I did. Pascal seems like a very nice, but powerful starting language as well.

  • Use Brainf*ck (Score:3, Funny)

    by fredrikj ( 629833 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:28PM (#5620023) Homepage
    'nuff said.

  • Stagecast Creator (Score:3, Informative)

    by TitaniumFox ( 467977 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:29PM (#5620027) Journal
    Stagecast Creator [stagecast.com] is a fairly elementary language that can introduce the young ones to object oriented thinking. You can program multi-level games and applications like calculators. Each object is defined by its set of parameters and how it interacts with other objects. A few friends of mine have used it to introduce their kids to programming and have found it to be pretty successful.

    TiFox
    • I forgot to mention that it's point'n'click like QuickBasic is, so it's suitable for younger children.

      Additionally, here's a link for game creation resources [ambrosine.com] for those who are non-programmers. Since games keep interest up, this could be a way to teach programming.

  • Older kids learn Python easily enough (Score:5, Interesting)

    by flockofseagulls ( 48580 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:29PM (#5620028) Homepage
    I've been teaching Python to older kids and teens (10+) and have had good success. A few younger kids started in the classes but had trouble with typing and general computer skills. Most of the kids caught on to programming and were writing their own variations on assignments.

    Very young kids have problems with attention span, reading, typing, etc. so you may want to use something like Lego Mindstorms instead of text-based programming.

    See www.geekschool.org for one approach.
    • To really ease kids into python, be sure to check out the turtle [python.org] module first. (ahhh... the memories)
    • Very young kids have problems with attention span, reading, typing, etc. so you may want to use something like Lego Mindstorms instead of text-based programming.

      Actually it's not just kids how have attention span issues who can benefit from Lego Mindstorms. If your siblings haven't yet taken high school geometry yet (or haven't had enough exposure to boolean logic), then Lego Mindstorms is a really cool to get a day-to-week-long introduction. Past that, I'd say, based on my own experience, that (when I wa

    • From an educational viewpoint it is early success and plenty of positive re-inforcement that is critical.

      Therefore the most important thing is that you (the tutor) should pick a language that you know well, so that you can help them debug, which is actually the most critical skill to learn.

      Python is good, but kids know understand web pages, and if they do something cool, then they can upload it, and their friends can see it. This gives them the peer approval (positive reinforcement) that keeps them goi

  • Rocky's Boots. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:37PM (#5620082) Journal
    Good luck finding it - but if you do it is a killer teacher of Boolean Logic.

    Last time I played it was on an Apple IIe.

    • Re:Rocky's Boots. (Score:3, Informative)

      by TitaniumFox ( 467977 )
      OMG, yes! I remember this program. At the time (10yo, I think), I didn't even realize what AND and OR gates were, and I was using them to solve the problems.

      It's an excellent program.

      Find it and an apple II emulator here [warrenrobinett.com].

    • Re:Rocky's Boots. (Score:3, Informative)

      by orangesquid ( 79734 )
      Rocky's Boots did wonders for my understanding of computers, logic, and programming. I would definitely start with Rocky's Boots on an Apple II emulator. There are disk images [warrenrobinett.com] floating around the net.

  • There's always (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Judg3 ( 88435 ) <jeremy@pa[ ]ck.com ['vle' in gap]> on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:38PM (#5620089) Homepage Journal
    Lego Mindstorms [lego.com] and it's RCX language. Fairly intuitive, robust, and you can get it to do cool real-world stuff.
    While I think a child might be ok with making some little PC games, I think they would love it even more if they could build a dinosaur and make it walk like they want it to.
    • Lego in general. It learns children combine basic blocks to form a larger thing. I know it helped me develop my technical skills

    • Re:There's always (Score:3, Insightful)

      by llamaluvr ( 575102 )
      I'm a teaching assistant for an introductory college programming course, and we used NQC (Not Quite C) to program the Mindstorm robots during part of the course. It was a cool hand-on activity, but the students picked up a lot of bad habits that became evident when we moved to C++ later in the course. A lot of students seemed to think that all functions had zero parameters and always returned the type "void", and that all variables should be globals.

      It was probably more due to the pace of the course, bu
  • The most important things to communicate about programming are the central concepts -- variables, expressions, conditional branching, looping, etc. Use whatever language you (or whoever is doing the teaching) are most comfortable with. Using an emulated C64 would not be that bad, aside from the primitiveness of line numbering by today's standards -- BASIC is not a bad TRAINING language, just a bad production one :-), but Perl or Python or BASH would be just as good or better depending on your religious v
    • I agree with the above, but I can tell you one very important thing. MAKE IT INTERESTING FOR THEM!!!
      I can not stress that enough. If they don't see a benefit (and I mean IMMEDIATE benefit), it doesn't matter what language you use. Thats why Logo was such a good training tool for kids. You get to see what you are doing up front. From there go to xBasic or something else that is more involved but still quick payoff.
      In my DOS days, Turbo C was a great language to use as the step up from BASIC. I am sure

  • Assembly (Score:3, Interesting)

    by inflexion ( 3981 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:48PM (#5620135) Homepage Journal
    I would vote for assembly (no this isn't a joke). Assembly is really simple when it comes down to it and would be good for instruction for several reasons:

    1) fewer operators than pretty much any other language (unless you're talking about x86 asm)
    2) teaches how computers *really* work inside. I never became an effective C programmer until I learned assembly and what was going on behind the scenes. Your kids will learn the basics of booleans, memory layout, branches, etc much more thoroughly than if they started with C. After they've mastered asm then they can move on to C and will appreciate it that much more.

    • Re:Assembly (Score:4, Funny)

      by GuyMannDude ( 574364 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @09:15PM (#5620278) Journal

      And teaching the kiddies assembly will have the side benefit of scaring them off of a career in programming so they'll be more likely to go where the big bucks are: business.

      Sure they'll cry now when make them sit still and trace program flow through the LDA and JMP instructions but when they're making six figures a year just for spewing some business buzzwords at those five-per-day meetings in comfy, fancy chairs they won't be able to stop thanking you enough.

      GMD

      • And teaching the kiddies assembly will have the side benefit of scaring them off of a career in programming

        I first picked up assembly by wanting to make stuff move around the screen on a VIC-20 in 4th grade. Of course, I though C-64 BASIC was the bomb after that, but I didn't know any better at the time, so I didn't realize that it was hard and scary. Kids have a knack for being able to do hard stuff if they don't know it is.

        Anyway, yes, I is a professional programmer now.
    • I agree 100% on you.
      I think it's very important for a computer hacker/programmer/scientist wanna-be to know how the computer work, and learning assembly makes that way clearer.

      I myself started with BASIC, tought.
      Only about five years ago I wrote my first assembly little program (for 8051) to control an LCD and some keys, attached to the serial port of a PC, a console for an mp3-car-player.
  • Whatever language you choose, I would strongly suggest teaching them to write test-first [c2.com].

    It will help keep them focused on writing something that works correctly, and writing only what is needed. It should also keep them from wasting hours trying to figure out why something isn't working.

  • So they'll never have a chance of learning to write in English. (kidding)
  • Not sure how appropriate it would be for very young kids, but the TI graphing calculators make a great environment for learning basic programming. They have their own scripting language that's very easy to pick up. It's nice because you can literally learn how to show output and accept input in almost no time at all (you could write the "guess a number between 1 and 1000 game" in around 10 minutes.) It also has graphing capabilities to handle graphics, though that would require some minimal math skills (
    • The TI-89 is much better for programming on.

      It may be more expensive (usually around $150), but it uses a command line interface with a seperate output window, you can split the screen to view graphics and source at once, it's open source (like all TI calculators using basic), and the manual comes with an ok intro to programming.

      Also, unlike the other calculators (I think) it allows the calling of external functions and programs, which can be sorted into folders in the filesystem.

      Throughout my enti

  • A pure and useless language (Score:3, Funny)

    by splattertrousers ( 35245 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:54PM (#5620167) Homepage
    Since they're just programming to learn to program, you have the opportunity to start with a "pure" language that doesn't necessarily have to be particularly useful.

    I'd stay away from kludgy languages like C, C++, Java, Basic, etc.

    So Smalltalk might be good. I'd suggest Lisp, but it might be too useless ;) I've also heard good things about Ruby.

    And assembler might be good too. A big light turned on in my head when I learned assember, because I finally figured out what was going on inside the computer.

    • Everyone knows that good programming can only be taught using Scheme [mit.edu]. Surely, kids can see the benefits of learning the statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the mother of all computer languages [google.com].

    • I remember from decades ago (in Byte magazine)the teaching of children what they called turtle graphics, it was basicaly a visual represetion of smalltalk or lisp especialy for kids. This was for kids in the 5-6 yr old range and up, they had great suscess teaching the kids commands to make the tutrles move, to commbine the movements into more complicatated functions lots of basic logical computer concepts. It made sliding them into a more formal language later much easier.
      • I did some work in a primary school last year, keeping their machines running (while being undermined by the official IT support people at the council... but anyway), and they had a bunch of what can only be described as plastic blobs, about the size of a football, but flatter.

        The cool thing though was that they had a control panel on the top that allowed you to input Logo programs, and then they'd trundle off around the room following you're program :P

        This has just reminded me how much fun it was to "che

  • flexible (Score:3, Insightful)

    by muon1183 ( 587316 ) <(muon1183) (at) (gmail.com)> on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:55PM (#5620168) Homepage
    Go with a flexible language as a first language. You don't want them stuck using only one programming paradigm. If possible, choose something that can do OOP, functional, logic, etc. It will serve them well down the road if they ever want to use it for anything not to be stuck in just one paradigm.
    • This could be too confusing for beginners if they can switch between OOP functional etc. I current teach C to people that have done a years worth of Java and they are always getting confused about what can be done in each language. Personally I'd say pick a pretty minimal language which can do graphics. Being able to draw pretty things on screen always interests people. From my own experince I'd say something like Pascal but as others have pointed out it can be difficult to find compilers. So I'd probably g
  • HTML is good because they can see immediate results and show their website to a friend, and learn a lot from doing "View Source".

    Lego Mindstorms is another one that is simplified but gives impressive results.

    Beyond that I would look for something that let them write games with graphics easily. Don't have any great suggestions though. BASICA for the original IBM PC, which is where I wrote my first games, was pretty good, but I think with windowing systems, doing any graphics has gotten so complicated tha

    • html is not a language, dude
      • Right. It's a text markup device.

        It'll serve as a good intro to TeX, though. You are going to teach your kid DTP the REAL way, aren't you?
      • html is not a language, dude

        Err, HTML: HyperText Markup L - l -
        lingo?

        If HTML is not a language, what then, are the likes of English and Italian, just to name a couple?

        HTML has conditionals, but not branches. Because of this, it is not a programming language.

    • Show them HTML - because it is forgiving, ubiquitous and has 'legs'

      It costs nothing to start, just open up notepad and IE/Moz and you are away.

      You can start almost anywhere with HTML and take it as near or far as you wish. You might just work out how to say "Hello World" and learn how to surf more effectively, or you might start exploring Flash, Java, Javascript, XML, PHP, Databases etc - Lots of directions to suit most tastes.

      Not everyone gets off on Knuth, and you can be productive and have fun without
      • HTML is a MARKUP language, not a programming language, it teaches nothing of programming only of markup. If you combine it, from the start, with something like ColdFusion, PHP or ASP that would be a good place to start, but HTML on it's own has no potential for teaching programming.

        • Re:Yes To HTML (Score:2, Insightful)

          by buffy_fan ( 193310 )
          Quite Right, I guess I should have been more clear.

          The point I was trying to make is that HTML is a base from which student can explore in whichever directions interest them, and have something to show for it at the end.

          I don't know the students in question so there is no way I can know what will make them happy and capture their imagination. That is the strength of html. So many things can be associated with it, that there should be something for everyone. No, it isn't a programming language, but it can
      • It costs nothing to start, just open up notepad and IE/Moz and you are away.

        And if they misbehave, threaten to make them do everything in vi.


        If they complain, start quizzing them on all the shortcuts [olemiss.edu].

  • Director (or its children/cousins) (Score:3, Informative)

    by dr00g911 ( 531736 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:58PM (#5620186)
    Macromedia Director (or Revolution, or Hypercard) seem to be a natural for an introductory taste to programming... at least they were for me.

    My "real" first taste of programming was BASIC, with the old K-power magazines and my Atari 400/Apple II+. Those were the days.

    At any rate, my entry into building actual applications came with Director 1.0, many years later.

    It gives a timeline that anyone can animate and assign rudimentary interactivity to -- building presentations, programs, and even specialized applications -- without any programming needed, but also allows for Lingo scripting (as a next step) -- which you can achieve pretty much anything with.

    Lingo is very close to BASIC, but the syntax comes closer to C/Javascript/PHP, and it's getting more object-oriented with every revision.

    The bottom line is that *anyone* can build an application or presentation with any of these tools that work, without programming.

    But *with* programming, you can add bells, whistles and functions that wouldn't be possible working in the timeline alone.

    From there, kids can (if they have aptitude) make the jump to C or scripting languages once they can understand more complicated syntax.

    Just my thoughts, but if someone tried to teach Perl or VBScript to an 8-year-old, I think it'd be an uphill battle.

    A battle I'd pay to see, because I think it'd be much funnier than anything that's broadcast on TV these days, at any rate.

    God, I miss LOGO.

    --dr00gy
    • I was hoping NOBODY would say Director. Macromedia languages are awful. The guy who came up with Lingo should be permanently barred from using computers. The language is extremely arbitrary and bears little or no useful resemblance to any "real" language. Recent versions of Flash apparently support a reasonably standard JavaScript spinoff, so progress is being made (and we'll ignore how hideous JavaScript is as a language), but whatever you do, don't let your kids "learn" by using Macromedia products.

      I be

  • I haven't seen anything since BASIC and Pascal that's been particularly good as a teaching language.

    Java, which is commonly used in schools, is *awful* as a first language -- tons of focus on semantics and OOP, not much on data structures.

    I strongly disagree with people that push Scheme as a first language. I don't think functional programming is incredibly intuitive.

    On the up side, whatever you use these days has memory protection and preemptive scheduling. I remember learning C on the classic Mac OS
  • Please do not start with BASIC, it was good for C=64, but only because there was nothing else (at least early on). Now we have python and other (even more?) fully implemented OOP languages, like scheme. Teach OOP first, they can learn BASIC later if they need to, it is harder the other way around.

  • go with visual stuff (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mikecheng ( 3359 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @09:07PM (#5620245) Homepage Journal
    No, I don't mean "Visual Basic" per se.

    The reason "we" got into programming when young is that we were all probably maths/science people looking for an outlet for our energy ("I never made the first team, I just made the first team laugh" - billy bragg).

    Unless they already have a flexible and mathematical brain, it's really going to be hard to teach them to cope with the logic of

    x = x+1

    That statement is directly contradictory to anything that they ever learn in maths, and I certainly wouldn't want them believing that it was actually a statement of equality.

    As programmers we contort our brains to think of it as 'x takes the value of whatever x is now plus 1' - but it's us changing our thinking to suit the computers for this specific task.

    I have thought a number of times about trying to teach teenagers computer programming, but after having taught them maths for the last 4 years, I don't think I would attempt this with any but the most advanced students.

    However, programming concepts can be taught using more visual tools. I can't remember the name of the program, but I have seen a Lego Mindstorm programming interface which is ideal for kids: it's visual, it's dragging and dropping program pieces, and it gives kids some concrete feedback on their progress (since it makes the Lego robot, or whatever, do something).

    You and I might be happy to write a "helloworld" or a "prime number list generator", but most people need something a bit less abstract as a proof of their progress. LOGO had the conrete output of a picture (so it'd be a competition between the kids to make the picture). Mindstorms have robots (so it's a competition to make the coolest robot).

    To summarise the summary of the summary
    • Be visual (few things are more boring to kids than grammar and syntax)
    • Pick something with concrete feedback (e.g. making pictures, controlling robots)
    • I think you are making too much of this. Kids can understand different words being used to mean different things in different context. Certainly fortran made a bad choice with =, and long ago we should have moved to the Pascal standard of := for assignment
      == boolean operator

      and then maybe
      = could be a lazy operator

      But regardless its easy to teach kids the notation and just say "=" means something else.

    • I don't know, when I was in high school I sucked at Math, I barely passed Calculus (mostly due to the fact our teacher died and we had a sub for half the year and all we did was have pizza parties and watch movies)

      But, I took to programming (Java, VB, C, Pascal) very well.


  • From about K through 6, I fondly remember using LOGO and I think PILOT to make different graphical creations. I also recall Logowriter as a fun tool to even make movies with ;) (I still remember making about a 5 minute long 'movie' with Airwolf (hey, it was a cool show), using a bunch of different sprites.)
    Note though that these, I believe, helped me to learn to use the computer in a fun and natural way, not necessarially to learn how to actually program correctly with them. That is probably more
    • One language I have never regretted learning (probably mainly because I work in prepress) is Postscript. Yes, it is a language. Yes, a programming language. Really.

      Yes, you pretty much only use it for things that end up on paper or film (which is quite often for me), but the language itself can be used for computation. The results don't always need to be printed, and you can create your own dictionaries of synthetic commands to use all the time.

      And you learn about stack-based languages. It's really q

      • Stack based languages are cool for some things. I love my RPN calculator -- it's a lot more efficient for typical computation. After using one, I feel my brain contort when I try to use a standard algebraic calculator. It's as if I need to figure out how to "engineer" my expression into the constraints imposed by order of evaluation.

        One word of warning, though: Stack-based machines have scalability problems when you try to make things high-performance. That's due primarily to the inherently serial n

  • Criteria (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Piquan ( 49943 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @09:20PM (#5620297)

    I'd look at it from some criteria. The weights that you give these criteria would vary depending on your target audience. For most audiences, I've listed them in descending order.

    I refer to the Lego Mindstorm's RCX here. There are two forms for this. One is the graphical program builder that comes with it. The other is traditional languages like NQC. Generally, NQC etc have all the disadvantages of C.

    • Interactivity. It is important for a student to be able to examine the state of the program. Being able to enter single commands, and later form them into subroutines, is very helpful. Good: Logo, Lisp, Python, Smalltalk. Bad: C, Perl, Java.
    • Feedback. The program should be able to easily effect things outside of the command processor. Turtles or robots are good vehicles for this. Graphical displays are okay. Very good: Logo, RCX. Kinda good: Smalltalk (under Squeak), Lisp (under something like Lispworks). Not too bad: Java, CGI Perl. Bad: C. (Note: Any language can give output, but there's an extra spark of interest when you can easily produce "cool" effects.)
    • Growth potential. As the student begins to learn about more advanced data structures and algorithms, the language should grow with the student. Good: Lisp, Python, Smalltalk. Bad: BASIC, Perl (it gets too bogged down in syntax).
    • Easy to use. The language should not require a lot of low-level work like memory allocation. It also should not have an overly cumbersome syntax. Good: Python, Logo, Lisp, Perl. Bad: C.
    • Flexibility. The language should allow you to teach different styles of programming, such as functional, imperative, and object-oriented. Good: Lisp. Bad: Almost anything else.
    • Real-world applicability. The language should be usable in the real world. Good: Python, Perl. Bad: Logo.

    Overall, either Logo or Python would be a good choice, depending on your target audience. I'd say that Logo would be a good choice for 12 and under, and that Python would be good for after that. Note that Logo knowledge easily translates to Lisp, so one possible track would be to start with Logo, and later transitition to Lisp.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I agree! Mathematica is certainly a good choice. (I used it quite a bit in my younger days, and once wrote a paper to teach programming in Mathematica.) I haven't used it in many years (about eight, I think), so I don't know where it's gone since I started.

        In case it didn't show before, I'll say that I'm a Lisp fan. Mathematica is actually more or less descended from early Lisp, and it shows in several aspects of the language. (I seem to recall seeing Car and Cdr functions, which are trademarks of Lisp.

      • Note that cost was not one of the criteria.

        Oh, I'll add: For those looking for a free (beer and speech) alternative to Mathematica, take a look at Maxima [sourceforge.net]. It's certainly not as polished as Mathematica, by any stretch of the imagination. I wouldn't recommend Maxima as a teaching language, but for somebody who just needs a symbolic integral now and then, or is toying with cryptosystems as a hobby, or whatever, it's good stuff.

        Again, Mathematica has a lot more than Maxima these days. If you're a student

  • You don't need to get a C64 emulator just to program in BASIC- there are plenty of free implementations tailored for all sorts of reasons, and quite a few intended for beginning programmers wanting to make cool stuff- simple graphics and the like. Kids like that kind of stuff usually, a high return for their time investment. Especially important with today's no-attention-span kids. I think some good experience programming could help with that though. :)

    Other than that, there are a wealth of other environ
  • Depending on the kids' age, I might recommend BYOND [byond.com]. Somewhere around 12 is about the minimum age I'd recommend for that, though it really depends on the individual. It is certainly not a system designed for kids, but it is easy enough to pick up that some kids with natural tendencies towards programming will probably have no trouble.

    The system itself is geared towards creating 2-D games (as someone else already said, making a game can keep it nice and fun), and comes complete with a powerful yet simple

  • http://www.stagecast.com/ is pretty good. It is visual programming tool for kids to create games. While it does not have programming language in classic sense, it teaches to think algorithms.

    My 10 yeard old dauggter mastered it pretty quickly.

  • Please clarify a few things - specifically what you mean by "children" - are we talking 6, 12, 16, what?

    For little kids ( say below 12 years of age), you want something to captivate them. Definitely things like Lego Mindstorms, Technixs, and anything else that moves. Remember that before 12 years of age, kids' logic is not the best.

    Now, if you are talking about 12 or so, then what you want is something that will let the kid start making useful programs. I'd suggest something interpreted - kids that age le

  • Karel++ (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BobTheJanitor ( 114890 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @09:36PM (#5620381) Homepage
    Karel++ [cc.or.us] is a great starting point. Karel is a simulated robot that exists in a virtual space that can be modified like a Skinner box.

    Karel takes simple commands (for example, turnLeft(), moveForward(), or pickUpBall()) and has boolean functions that act as sensers (such as hitWall() or wallOnRight().

    When coupled with basic control structures, it's a fun and easy language to learn, and most Karel implementations have a graphic display of Karel moving around its world, so a wall-hugging function like the following isn't purely academic, it can be experienced just by watching.

    repeat forever{
    while(!hitWall()){
    moveForw ard();
    }
    turnLeft();
    }
    You can make Karel programs that solve mazes or that clear the room of balls, etc. It's obviously not a good programming language to do anything of use (although I have seen a Karel half-adder accomplished by picking up and dropping balls), it's a great introduction to OO programming that seems more like a game than education.
    • That's what they used in my High School... I think it's as good a place to start as any. Although I like the Mindstorms suggestions as well, but I think something like this would be easier to move from when they start to use something like C or Java.

  • Movies (Score:5, Funny)

    by GuyMannDude ( 574364 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @09:45PM (#5620410) Journal

    Sit them down on the couch, push the DVD of Hackers into your player, pour the microwave popcorn into a big bowl and have them enjoy the movie for 90 minutes. Then when the show is over, carefully explain to them that real-life programming is the exact opposite of everything they just saw.

    Hope that helps,
    GMD

    • Exactly. Explain also that it's like becoming a priest, except for the sex with small boys thing. You'll be married to your work. Only your peers will understand you. And you won't go to the beach to get a tan.

      Disclaimer: This post is not intended to be a flame. If you are a programmer and enjoy having sex with boys, my intent was not to insult you. Although, you might want to get some help.
  • When I was in elementary school and Junior High, I learned some programming, mostly in Basic. I remember writing a program to print my name, and a few other such simple things. It wasn't all that exciting to me. I didn't really get into programming until high school when I had a ti-81 programmable graphics calculator. I discovered I could program it to do my homework. I also discoverd that I liked putting it in drawing mode and programming things to appear on the screen.

    The graphical aspect of progra

  • See the Squeakland site [squeakland.org] to see how Squeak Smalltalk can be used in a classroom.

    Squeak is great on multiple levels:

    • It's Smalltalk, a true OO language (unlike Perl, Python, Java, C++ etc).
    • It's multimedia out of the box
    • It's truly cross-platform (same bit-for-bit image can run on 10 different platforms)
    • It's muckable (entire source code of OS down to the VM can be patched in a running system, and even the VM can be patched and simulated and rebuilt)
    • It's internet ready (built in email, news, irc, web clie

  • Robocode (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gefd ( 562296 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @10:08PM (#5620485)
    Though I don't have children I would think that something like Robocode [ibm.com] would be ideal. Considering that you can get almost instant feedback for the changes you make, and that it's a game, which if my niece is any indication, will consume any child above 2.5yrs to the point of tears when bedtime comes around.

    - Gef

  • LOGO... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by netfunk ( 32040 ) <.icculus. .at. .icculus.org.> on Friday March 28, 2003 @10:17PM (#5620520) Homepage
    ...or Visual Basic. Seriously.

    I have to say this, because someone recommended assembly language with a straight face.

    Some things you should remember:

    1) Programming languages are just an expression of a problem's solution. The less time you can spend learning to express, the more time you can be solving.

    2) Teaching someone logic is really the goal at early stages. Teaching them how a computer works (i.e. - low level programming) is really just noise at the start. Teaching someone object orientation is problematic in the opposite direction.

    3) Your mileage may vary by age. A ten year old learns VERY differently than an 11 year old.

    4) You're probably a genious that learned to program by plowing through manuals and books and scouring the web. This makes you the exception to the rule. Most people do NOT learn this way.

    5) Not everyone will be good at programming, ever, but everyone can make it further than Hello World...they can make it to the point where they are conscious that they are _creating_ something.

    6) Most people benefit from immediate visual feedback. Teaching someone how to compile and link slows them down. Teaching someone to write to stdout slows them down. Slapping together something in Visual Basic and then showing them how to hook up responses gets them moving quickly, especially when they can hit F5 and see what happens immediately. VB adds other complexity, though, which makes something like LOGO better in terms of simplicity.

    7) Not everyone wants to be a coding god. Some people just want to see what programming is, some people _think_ they are l33t hax0rs but don't know shit (you always get these in large classes), some people are there against their will (parents made them do it, etc)...just keep it simple and fun. Most people won't take this to be the start of a career in software development.

    I used to teach programming courses for summer camps. Java is just totally inaccessible as a first language. I tried. Visual Basic actually worked very well. Object orientation is best explained by NOT explaining it (people will naturally understand what a "push button" is, but it's a waste of time to explain how it's "subclassed" from a "widget". These things can come later). Half the trick is not scaring them off in the first few weeks.

    If there was a free Logo package that didn't suck, I'd have used that (maybe there is, I couldn't find one at the time, but that was years ago).

    My response to it all was to develop Toby (http://icculus.org/toby/), which is a variation on Logo.

    --ryan.

  • This may be a weird answer, but I learned with FutureBasic (version 3, I think) on a macintosh. First, let's get one thing out of the way: It's not basic. It's procedural, but it allows well-structured code. It allows really quick really powerful application development, but it's entirely coding, no silly point-and-build stuff. And I learned when I was eight; I had looked at C++, but I just wasn't ready for that yet. The editor is great (it's handling of tabs is still the best of any editor I've ever seen)
  • I think REBOL would be a good beginning language because you can stick with it for a long time and it'll remain useful.

    It doesn't have the stupid limitations of BASIC. It's incredibly easy to parse strings, retrieve data from internet, do stuff with arrays (called blocks in REBOL), TCP/IP etc. It handles user advancement pretty darn well, going all the way to GUI programming.

    REBOL for Dummies is a very well-written book, although it's dated by a few versions. I strongly suggest reading it.

    You can get RE
  • I first programmed with Microsoft QBASIC. I thought it was awesome, but I was a young kid at the time. Hell, I made some pretty cool things. Things have changed since then. When I was trying to learn C++, BASIC came back to haunt me. I did not understand even how to use functions and loops properly, so that was bad, and I gave up. Python, however, was so clear and simple I actually learned more about C++ using Python than C++!

    I recommend Python, since you can write some very good programs quickly and its j

  • PostScript (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iankerickson ( 116267 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:06AM (#5621128) Homepage
    Consider using PostScript as a teaching language for kids.

    I know, I know. Calm down, breath in and out, and put the flame-throwers away. Yes, PostScript is obscure. Yes, it's not a prepositional language (i.e. modifier before object, as in English), like Pascal or Basic. It's not even remotely "English-like". Yes, it's not a functional language, like C or nearly everything else. Yes, it's not object-oriented. Yes, it's not a fasionable language or one that will prepare kids for "the real world". There isn't even a bleeping "For Dummies" book for PostScript. Et cetera, and so on and so forth. Blah blah blah.

    But PostScript does have a lot going for it, due in part to its wierdness:
    • It's freely available and portable. Download Ghostscript and a viewer, and you're done. You can even use Adobe Distiller, if you already have it. (It's simple: type out an ASCII EPS in any editor, save the file as .eps or .ps, and drag-and-drop the text file onto Distiller. The interpretation will scroll by in the Distiller window and you'll get a PDF if your code is correct.)
    • You can download COMPLETE documentation that is well-written and loaded with code examples from Adobe and a few other places on the web. The Adobe books are named by color: the Red book, the Blue book, the Green book. Google for "Thinking in PostScript".
    • Postscript creates output kids can understand: pictures. You can do numeric results if you want, but basically the can program the computer to generate really cool pictures extremely easily.
    • They can print the results. Send the completed EPS or PS to the printer, and your kids get a hard copy of the results. It difficult to convey how satisfying this really is until you've done it. Even on a crappy printer, PostScript output looks really, really good compared to the image on a monitor. You can put the output on your fridge.
    • It's extensible. Add fonts, TIFF files, EPS files, or JPEG photos to a directory the interpreter can find, and kids can "call" them, like subroutines in a library. You could supply them with, say, JPEGs of their favorite cartoon character or rock star (What's the difference? Eh, Barney?) and they could write a program to make a montage, or a kalediescope, or an escher-like pattern from the photo(s).
    • It's interactive, if you get ghostscript. I think edit-save-compile-run-debug-repeat style IDEs are a little bit much for beginners. You want to remove all upfront obstacles to their playing with the language. With an interactive language, you can type code from the prompt and see what happens right away. That's what was so easy about BASIC on PCs from the 80s. The computers were so crude back then, most didn't have the free memory to support a modern IDE with seperate editor, interpreter, compiler, and debugger. It all had to fit in ROM.
    • PostScript is standardized. There are well-thought out, detailed specs for the language that have very reliable, nearly bug-free implementations. One non-obvious advantage of this is that code examples in PostScript from almost any book will work on your setup. Compare that to BASIC or (shudder) AppleScript, where it depends entirely on the version you have how much work will be required to rewrite the code sample into working code.
    • It's a real world language. Most printers, copiers, pre-press equipment and software, and all PDFs use PostScript for their inner logic. You can read the newspaper or a magazine together and look for fonts, rules, ligatures, transformations, and em-dashes.

    Printing and publishing are great "nerdy" hobbies for kids. I used to help my parents collate the books they wrote, photocopy hand-drawn illustrations on to the dot-matrix print-out from our Apple IIe, and trouble-shoot Apple Writer II and the printer. It turned out those skills (as prerequisites) ne

  • The Jargon file [catb.org] has an entry on BASIC. Quite frankly, I've not completely recovered.

  • Many Choices (Score:3, Informative)

    by bpb213 ( 561569 ) <bpbyrne AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday March 29, 2003 @02:25AM (#5621324)
    I have seen a lot of programming languages for kids around:

    1. Squeak. (Based on smalltalk). Graphical environment that has all sorts of 3d, sound, voice, etc stuff to play with. Everything is editable, down right to the squeak environment (of course this isnt mandatory, but can be done). Squeak kind sucks for professional work (its kinda slow, being an emulated environment) but is great to teach stuff on. Heck, it even has a part that kids can "program" without writing a line of code (using a visual paradigm that I dont have the most experience with, sorry). (oh, btw, squeak runs on all platforms)

    2. Logo. Yup, still alive and kicking. Also runs on all platforms. If you want to teach multiagent systems, then you can look into *Logo (star logo).

    3. Boxer. A mac only thing that has a lot of educational properties.

    4. Toon Talk. Oriented on the younger crowd. Uses a lego like code building process to solve missions. Only for windows i think.

    Any way, those programs should more then enough provide an educational start in programming to the younger audience.
  • I don't care how many people say it teaches bad habits....I think quickbasic is a good way to start. it picks up syntax errors as you type and it's a good way to introduce functions and teach them the basics of writing algorithms.
  • Seymour Papert, who holds the Lego chair for learning research at MIT (and who created Logo) wrote a book called the Connected Family which addresses this issue. The book is available at amazon [amazon.com], and there's a companion website [connectedfamily.com]. In a nutshell, he recommends using meaningful projects to teach programming concepts in an environment like that provided by Logo.
  • You don't need to molly-coddle most inquisitive children on technical issues. At a young age they WANT to learn technical stuff, and they find it easy.

    Back in the early 80's, my parents gave me a computer in reward for learning to count to 20 (the number of stairs in our house). I don't actually remember this (I was about 3?) but supposedly I just played games on it and crap for a while.

    However, I do remember that I was programming when I was 5. Sure, it was crappy BBC BASIC, and my programming was all:

    I
    • Just incase it sounded like I was blowing my own trumpet in the parent post, I wanted to point out that I haven't become some sort of master coder simply because I started early.

      Infact, I've met coders with just a few years' experience who can kick my ass. Despite the early grounding, it appears I turned into a generalist rather than a specialist. Perhaps this proves that nurture is not everything..

  • We just started a programming class at our high school using HTML and PHP. This is our first programming class and it has been a resounding success. The students are learning something that they can immediately put to use, and they'll be able to use it almost everywhere. It is very cross platform, all they need is a text editor.

    A good side effect is that we can help teach website design. Hopefully 20 less crappy websites when these students go out into the world.

  • To adequately prepare them for real life working environments, put the ones who know the least about programming in *charge* of the smart ones. Call those in charge managers.

  • Feedback and Showing Off (Score:3, Interesting)

    by eddy the lip ( 20794 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @12:57PM (#5622568)

    Interesting that this question comes up now, as I'm just starting to teach programming to a 12 year old.

    One of the first things that I worried about was what language to use. After some thought, I decided that as long as a few guidelines were followed in language choice, it didn't really matter. The most important things were:

    • rapid feedback. Children are remarkably curious (at least based on a few flammable experiments in my parent's basement), but they also like instant feedback. They need to see results, or they'll lose interest.
    • give them something they can show off. Being able to go to their friends and say "look at the cool thing I did" is great incentive.
    • avoid theory like the plague. "|| is logical OR and does this..." is boring. "if($friend == 'tracy' || $friend == 'brent') { print "bugger off!"; }" is fun. And better than "hello, world."
    • simple environment. They're learning a language and a new way of thinking already, no need to make them learn some complex IDE as well.

    Language considerations came from that:

    • "rapid feedback" and "simple environment" meant a scripting language (no compile step), and a text editor. A side benefit of this was portability. I can teach on my linux box or her windows machine.
    • "showing off" meant something web based. She already knows HTML and maintains more websites than I can count, and a lot of her friends are online. She linked her first lesson from her homepage, so this seemed to be a good decision.
    • ability to use a subset of the language. I wanted to jump into making stuff right away, rather than spending three lessons getting up to speed on language requirements.

    This all translated into a text editor, PHP and assignments uploaded to her site. I seriously considered Perl and Python (especially Python - as it turns out that would have been very handy for teaching proper style. The concept of whitespace and proper indenting is surprisingly difficult to instill ;) ). PHP isn't my favorite language for a lot of reasons, but it's fine for teaching control flow, logic, data structures, modularity. It was handily available on her server, and meant she could show her work to her web friends right away. Python might be better in a classroom situation, because there's a pool of people with a similar environment that work can be shown to.

    At any rate, we're only three lessons in, so this is still in the expermintal stages. But if you're interested in swapping experiences, reply to this and I'll leave an email address.

  • I know I learned a lot of logic *before* I tackled any "hard" programming languages by writing game mods. Even if there is a graphical tool involved it's usually easy to see a fun result, and there are always games like Neverwinter Nights that combine a graphical editor with underlying code. And hell, you get to play games!
  • First person shooters. Start them out with Doom so they can appreciate the concept, them up to Duke Nukem 3D, then Quake, Quake II, Q3A, Unreal Tournament and UT2003, CounterStrike.

    Hacking. Get his older sister a SprintPCS phone and the next month take him to SprintPCS - show him how to put in her phone number and the default password and get a complete list of all the people she has called, times and dates. Show him how to go onto her computer and read her AIM logs, look through her Internet Cache for
    • You forgot the most important one!

      <joke>
      Slashdot. Teach the kid the fine art of karma whoring. Or maybe even trolling. It's great for the ego! Teach them to turn on the "show link target" option so they don't go to goatse.cx. Teach them about the insensetive clods chasing Natalie Portman with a bowl of hot grits through soviet russia while you build a beowulf cluster of CowboyNeals.
      </joke>

      I can't believe you forgot this.

  • I am working on a library to help newer programmers get started with programming. The first section uses something like turtle graphics, but it is all written in and controlled with python and pygame. The first game is pong. There are also a bunch of demos and a couple of other games with the distribution. It is available at: http://www.nongnu.org/pygsear/ [nongnu.org]

  • I was actually thinking about this topic the other day, so here's what I decided.

    I would start out by having him (male for the sake of simplicity) play old games... games like Jetpack, Al Lowe's games [allowe.com], text-based games like Tradewars, Zork, Adventure. There are three reasons for this: One, these are games I remembered playing as a kid, and loved. It'd be great to rediscover them through your kid's eyes. Two, they're cheap. Every single console cost $100-$200 when it came out, with its games costing ~$
  • Afterall it was meant for teaching programming.
  • Isn't a half bad choice if you can find a copy.

    The language was designed for teaching, and I've found that it does a good job of enforcing concepts. For example in BASIC the = is used both as assignment and comparison, while in Turing you use := for assignment. (just one example)

    Syntax-wise, Turing is pretty much Pascal with a few tweaks to it, so it's not nearly as difficult as grasping something like C right off the top. Even better would be something like OOT (Object Oriented Turing). Like C++, it
  • My first suggestion would be Javascript - if the computer has a relatively recent browser, it will have the interpretor with it - editing takes nothing more than a text editor. Error checking and debugging will be a problem, but no more so than early BASICs, IMO - plus, they can learn HTML and a bit of web design.

    My other suggestion is Blassic [arrakis.es] - a "classic" BASIC language, GPL'd and everything. There are a ton of examples, though some take a little muddling through in order to understand since the variables

  • I taught ICT in a school for a year, and to teach the most basic programming concepts, to young children I found that logo was easily the best, since it was so visual. Things like We have this program called House. House has something which we call a varible. The varible controls how big a house we draw and then giving them demonstrations of House 10, House 50 and House 100 so easily explains what varibles are to young minds.

    For serious, older programmers - 14-18 teach an OO language. I started on Ada, the

  • As a parent, and as a programmer - I can give the most final answer we all need.

    Don't. Start them early on Law, and get them into law school. Programmers are unemployed. Doctor's can't afford to stay in business. Small business are risky. Middle managers get laid-off. Lawyers always have high paying work. Especially in Michigan I hear.

    Allright, before you mod me off topic - you can go ahead and teach them some real basic VB/Access skills so that they can then be lawyers in the tech industry, and ma

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