Monday, July 30, 2007
More Resources For Teaching Children To Program
As I've stated before, I have a young son who I have been trying on and off to teach to program. I still owe you a post talking about what I've found does and does not work. In the mean time, I ran across this article which give several good resources. It mentions many of the standbys including Lego Mindstorms, Logo, Scratch, and Basic but also a few I haven't looked into before.
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Interesting article, but some of the comments there are way off the mark. Suggesting to a kid that they play on an Apple IIe or a Commodore to learn programming would be about as usedful as if I had been given a stack of punchcards 20 years ago. It's swell, from a historical perspective, but it's not going to keep the kids' attention for more than a few minutes, and then, only as a novelty.
ReplyDeleteThere have been some success stories of people teaching basic on a C= or Apple //e but I tend to agree with your sentiment. The idea of making the computer do something is not as powerful as it once was. Kids get to see that all around them. They want something they can see. There are some good programs though like Scratch and Mindstorms that give you a good sense of programming without being quite as boring as:
ReplyDelete10 print "Steve is cool"
20 goto 10