Programming for kids
I posted this to the mailing list, but I thought it might been of interest to our many(!) blog readers too.
At Wednesday’s meeting there was a discussion about how in the ‘olden days’ (the 80’s) when a child got a computer it booted up into a programming environment. These days if they want to do programming they have to go searching to set up some kind of IDE. We also talked about putting a programming environment on a phone as a way to get kids into programming. Well I’ve just seen an article mirroring this discussion exactly.
Adrian suggested that Javascript might be the language to use, since it is on virtually every machine out there.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
There was a discussion board session at ACCU 2007 which followed up on this topic (See http://www.accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2007/accu2007_sessions)
The panel consisted of (I can’t remember all the details):
– David Wood from Symbian
– Russel Winder (advocator of dynamic programming languages such as groovy, python and ruby)
– Two others… can’t quite remember who it was now.
Mary Poppendieck was also in the audience and contributed a lot.
Unfortunately I didn’t make notes… a few points I recall coming out of it are:
– When we were young computers were new and it was the in-thing to be using them, but now they are old-hat and young people are used to very media-rich instant gratification ttechnology such as games consoles, ipods, etc…
– Even if they could program mobile phones, they may not want to unless there was a very easy way to get into it with instant results. They are not going to want to learn how to write all the scaffolding of most languages just to get a hello-world application to build compared to the simple “10 print “hello myname”, 20 goto 10 that we all started with.
– Customization of your phone with simple coding could be the first step. This could be similar to the MS-Vista gadgets to provide little utilities. These may have the cool factor of showing it off to their friends.
– When someone reaches the limit of a simple visual development environment they may be motivated to find out more and learn a proper programming language.
April 20th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
[...] program it, on a mobile phone at ACCU 2007. We had a similar side discussion at a meeting of the Oxtremist and there was an article at O’Reilly called Where’s the 8 bit revolution for my [...]