Teaching kids to program; learning back to love programming.
category: general [glöplog]
http://vimeo.com/5047563
By _why the lucky stiff
By _why the lucky stiff
I find basic4gl to be an adequate environment to teach kids.
http://www.basic4gl.net/
I taught programming to my 10 yo sister with it and she was able to make a small text adventure. She hasn't turn into a code fanatic though.
To me the key features to make a child interested are :
- easy write/compile/run workflow, one file = one program
- not to much features, slow pace in getting features
- graphics and textmode programming
What is hard to get for a child is :
- to be able to have rewarding results fast
- the concept of expression/statement
- not to confuse keywords and identifiers (basic is awful for that)
- understand that strings are not "eval'd" in any way
http://www.basic4gl.net/
I taught programming to my 10 yo sister with it and she was able to make a small text adventure. She hasn't turn into a code fanatic though.
To me the key features to make a child interested are :
- easy write/compile/run workflow, one file = one program
- not to much features, slow pace in getting features
- graphics and textmode programming
What is hard to get for a child is :
- to be able to have rewarding results fast
- the concept of expression/statement
- not to confuse keywords and identifiers (basic is awful for that)
- understand that strings are not "eval'd" in any way
do you remember logo? how effective, as a teaching language, do you feel this was? it's seems fairly dead now and I personally don't know anyone who was big into logo as a kid.
_why rules. i love his ruby book, too.
http://poignantguide.net/ruby/chapter-7.html for a quick impression. yes, it's about programming.
what about this?
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BCX/
i haven't tried this out yet though.
http://www.basic.mindteq.com/
found that there.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BCX/
i haven't tried this out yet though.
http://www.basic.mindteq.com/
found that there.
Obviously, Brainf*ck is the way to go!
I remember they did this with Processing a year or so back? went down really well.
Yeah, Scratch is quite fun, reminds me a litle of the old Lego Mindstorms language - I think some of the same people were involved in both. I'm also keeping on eye on Microsoft's Kodu
cool
maybe a game would work. where you have a problem and you have to pick the right line of code to solve the problem. starting from basic code and then working your way down to c or something like that. just an idea.
Not really a teaching language, so it's off-topic here, but Core Wars is probably the ultimate programming game. Does anyone know of any others?
hexen: Interesting idea. Maybe it could be done like "Who becomes a millionaire?": The player is asked a question about a programming-related problem, and the player must then select one of several possible answers (multiple-choice).
yeah, i was thinking this could be one of the possibilites. it shows some buckets and one is full of water and there is only one bucket on the otherside and you have to select the correct case statement in the multiple choice part. so that the bucket full of water dumps it's water out in the empty bucket and if they select the wrong one it dumps it on the ground or something.
RoboCode is already used in various educational institutions too.
Colobot?
skrebbel: wait you managed to get something out of the ruby book?
I remember the star-faced monkey. I remember the foxes. I remember the dude who killed his daughter (or daughter-in-law) and her ghost. I remember he had a neighbor who couldn't do the same name in the morning and afternoon.
I have _no_ idea about ruby whatsoever. This is 3 years after trying to read the book.
The book is just poorly written in my mind, as the parts which are memorable are not the subject matter that he is trying to present.
I remember the star-faced monkey. I remember the foxes. I remember the dude who killed his daughter (or daughter-in-law) and her ghost. I remember he had a neighbor who couldn't do the same name in the morning and afternoon.
I have _no_ idea about ruby whatsoever. This is 3 years after trying to read the book.
The book is just poorly written in my mind, as the parts which are memorable are not the subject matter that he is trying to present.
@evilpaul: Core Wars FTW! :D
poor kids...
What truck said.
I heard a quote somewhere about Alice In Wonderland being the best book on programming for the layman, because it's the best book on anything for the layman. On that reasoning the Poignant Guide is probably the second most awesome programming book ever (assuming you get the humour, which probably 50% of the world won't), but that's not much of a consolation if you're trying to learn Ruby from it.
(It's oddly satisfying to watch that video and discover that in real life he looks like the love child of Jack Black and Jim Carrey. It kind of... figures.)
For what it's worth, it was the online copy of the Pickaxe book which sold me on Ruby... every single chapter had something in it to make me think "Fuck yeah! Where has this been all my life?" like when I first learnt about regular expressions in Perl. Annoyingly they've only kept the first edition online for free though, and it's probably way out of date these days.
I heard a quote somewhere about Alice In Wonderland being the best book on programming for the layman, because it's the best book on anything for the layman. On that reasoning the Poignant Guide is probably the second most awesome programming book ever (assuming you get the humour, which probably 50% of the world won't), but that's not much of a consolation if you're trying to learn Ruby from it.
(It's oddly satisfying to watch that video and discover that in real life he looks like the love child of Jack Black and Jim Carrey. It kind of... figures.)
For what it's worth, it was the online copy of the Pickaxe book which sold me on Ruby... every single chapter had something in it to make me think "Fuck yeah! Where has this been all my life?" like when I first learnt about regular expressions in Perl. Annoyingly they've only kept the first edition online for free though, and it's probably way out of date these days.
truck, i think the book is absolutely useless for learning ruby. i think it's an awesome fun read if you already know ruby, however :-)
gasman, oh yeah, that's also the book that sold me on ruby. and then it's performance made me dump it again. it's nice for quick hacks, but i haven't managed making good websites and/or demos with it yet. the websites (at least ones made by rails-ish frameworks) can handle up to five simultaneous visitors (on a dedicated xeon) and i managed to opengl 1000 cubes with no less than 3 fps. that may have been my sloppy programming skills, too, but i did not find it very encouraging.