Re: Teaching Children How to Program

[robot_tourist]

I wish I'd been on your class when I was 12. Your lesson plans are pretty good, but perhaps there are a few too many concepts for the first Item. If you are good at explaining those concepts and your class is intelligent enough, that's fine, but the first Item looks a little heavy to me. Personally, I would look more at variables first than code re-use.

When I started programming all I had was the manual of my dad's C=64. As I didn't have an IQ of 200 I was always amazed when I read about games programmers, like the Darling brothers, who were publishing their own games when still at boarding school. I pretty much gave up on programming as a hobby until my late teens when I finally understood the DATA lines in C=64 programs and I could suddenly design my own sprites! Unfortunately I didn't persevere with collision detection. To my shame it took until 2nd year at university to understand how to program things, not just a single sprite, on a frame-by-frame basis. We were in pairs for a practical class and my partner had a loop to decide what to do with each sprite at each frame.