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OT: Programming For Kids

by karlgoethebier (Abbot)
on Nov 13, 2016 at 18:41 UTC ( [id://1175829]=perlmeditation: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

This is something i would like to share.

The last two weeks i took care of a 14 year old trainee at the company i'm with.

I needed to prepare something for him and by chance i stumbled over Scratch.

IMHO this is real good stuff. We had a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

Please see also Snap! It looks like Scheme is not dead ;-)

Regards, Karl

«The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: OT: Programming For Kids
by haukex (Archbishop) on Nov 13, 2016 at 18:56 UTC
Re: OT: Programming For Kids
by Discipulus (Canon) on Nov 13, 2016 at 19:31 UTC
    good kind of OT karl! iirc choroba worked on karel intended to introduce to programming for young people.

    Perhaps it is time to thing something appealing in Perl..

    L*

    There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
    Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.

      good kind of OT karl! ii

      Its not OT at all, its just a regular meditation

      OT nodes should not be approved at all

Re: OT: Programming For Kids
by davido (Cardinal) on Nov 14, 2016 at 03:38 UTC

    My kids have been learning to use Scratch. It's nice that they're able to get simple games going quickly. They enjoy it. I like the messaging patterns they inherit from Smalltalk.

    One shortcoming of Scratch is that the stand-alone version of Scratch 2.0 requires Adobe Air, which is not supported for Linux. So those of us who have mostly made the transition off of Windows and Macs are constrained to either use the web-based version, or fire up Wine or a VM.

    This problem is exacerbated by the fact that many robotics projects incorporate some version of Scratch, and thus are difficult to use with Linux as well.

    I keep hoping this situation will improve.


    Dave

      "I like the messaging patterns..."

      Yes. Unfortunately one can't pass variables or lists. I don't know why. The guys on the Scratch forum complain about this :-(

      BTW, it reminded me to good old Director where you could write funny things like set the color of sprite "foo" to "green" or go to the frame (!) - until they switched to dot syntax ;-)

      Or some message to mission control:

      on directFleet me, pt set fleet to list (sShip1, sShip2 sShip3, sShip4, sShip5, sShip6) set newPos to map(pt, modlRect, stageRect) updateStage follow sShip1, newPos, fleet end

      Regards, Karl

      «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

Re: OT: Programming For Kids
by marto (Cardinal) on Nov 13, 2016 at 19:20 UTC

    Scratch is OK, I usually recommended it to younger people. Why not perl?

      "...Why not perl?"

      Good question. Because the boy was a gamer? Sprite animation for best motivation. And i had actually only five days to build something with him. The rest of the time was for writing his report as well as visiting other workplaces in the company.

      Regards, Karl

      «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

Re: OT: Programming For Kids
by Erez (Priest) on Nov 15, 2016 at 08:32 UTC

    I think of this as a two sided issue. One is teaching the ideas of programming, that is variables, loops, conditionals, functions, objects etc.
    And the other is focusing on teaching a programming language proper.

    As an aside, I still consider Logo to be the perfect marriage of the two, where you could either muck around with the "turtle", or actually create fun stuff while utilizing the tools of programming. But seeing as this is not cool enough for today's audience, I refer mostly to two tools:

    One is "programming games". Not in the redcode sense, but stuff like Human Resource Machine which revolves around solving puzzle using said programming tools.

    The other is JavaScript. It's ubiquitous, and you can get the results of your changes visible immediately, like the way we used BASIC in the olden days. In fact, nowadays every browser comes with a Javascript REPL of its own, and once the student gets more acquainted with the language, code examples are legion, and are handy, unlike the usual "I learned Ruby/Perl/Python, now what do I do with it (other than looking at projects that have 50,000 LoC and do crazy magic)?".

    Principle of Least Astonishment: Any language that doesn’t occasionally surprise the novice will pay for it by continually surprising the expert

      "...I still consider Logo to be the perfect marriage..."

      Sure. But the kid refused it. His favorite game is World Of Tanks. The website of Logo was too infantile for him ;-) The first impression matters.

      Regards, Karl

      «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

        The website of Logo was too infantile for him

        Yep, the whole thing is not very cool these days. I had a book about Logo which was a comic-book for all purposes. That was a very cool way of learning to program back then. I doubt it will raise more than a chuckle from one of today's kids.

        Principle of Least Astonishment: Any language that doesn’t occasionally surprise the novice will pay for it by continually surprising the expert

Re: OT: Programming For Kids
by FreeBeerReekingMonk (Deacon) on Nov 30, 2016 at 20:10 UTC

      ♪ ♫ …Do you wanna code a snowman? It doesn't have to be a snowman… ♬

      "If you have a daughter..."

      Sure, i have one. But she is 28. Last time she programmed something was about 10 years ago or so.

      Here last homework was some 2D animation with Borland Pascal/Delphi.

      Say: Can you guess who wrote it?

      Thanks for the hint and regards, Karl

      «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

        Say: Can you guess who wrote it?

        Is that a trick question? During math exercises on the computer, I press the enter and she presses the numbers/answers on the keypad.

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