Programming for my kids
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
I would like to recommend scratch (homepage scratch.mit.edu) It is a graphical approach to programming and very easy to pick up. The programs can be uploaded to the scratch homepage for sharing with other. Tim
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
I'd start with something like BASIC or maybe C# as a compromise initially. C is not a very forgiving language for newbies and there doesn't seem much demand for C/C++ coders these days anyway. I don't think you'd be able to do much in C without pointers, how would you even deal with strings? Ok, character arrays I suppose but that's still effectively a pointer but with different syntax.
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Something which I just thought of. Interrupt driven multitasking. What other ways are there?
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
I think pre-emptive implies interrupts (or some sort of interrupting timer even if not hardware interrupts). The tasks are being pre-empted before they have necessarily finished. Cooperative - where tasks explicitly sleep to let others run State tables can give multi-tasking behaviour in a single threaded environment. Each doing a small amount of work for the current state for each 'tick' of the system.
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For an 11 and 8 year old maybe let them try Small Basic[^] and see if they like it. BTW, I started programming with SQL back in 1999. I learned .net C# and VB.Net in 2001 and have been programming ASP.Net ever since. I have never used an C in my life. I don't think C is used very much so why learn that first?
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Get them started with something very simple. HTML is not a programming language, but true programming languages are all very dry. I don't think an 8/11 years old will be interested in "sorting" or "searching" things. I say, get them started with "Adobe Action Script". Action Script is used to program Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and based in Flash. Flash you know is the popular animation and interactive stuff creating tool. You could get them started with simple drawing/animation and later on tell them how to move/transform things using Action Script. If you don't know Action Script, I believe you will learn it with some effort. Because you have playing with the beasts like Fortran :)
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Visual Basic.Net with XNA perhaps? If it helps, I started at BASIC, used the similarities to move to legacy VB, then used the syntax similarities to move to VB.Net. VB.Net and C# both use the .Net framework, so moving from one to the other was just a matter of syntax. C# and C/C++ look similar, so it was fairly simple to migrate there. C/C++ both just compile down to ASM; guess where I'm headed next ;P
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
XNA can be used only with C#. Well, it can be used easily only with C#. Take a look at this, it seems a lot of work just to use VB. http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/1464.aspx[^] I started at junior high school on QBasic, moved to Visual Basic by myself at the beginning of high school, where they taught me Pascal and Delphi. That sucked, so I moved to C#. And after all this migrating, I understand I still suck at programming coz I never learnt C and C++. Let them start with C, it's hard but I guess it pays.
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Visual Basic.Net with XNA perhaps? If it helps, I started at BASIC, used the similarities to move to legacy VB, then used the syntax similarities to move to VB.Net. VB.Net and C# both use the .Net framework, so moving from one to the other was just a matter of syntax. C# and C/C++ look similar, so it was fairly simple to migrate there. C/C++ both just compile down to ASM; guess where I'm headed next ;P
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
story of my life. Started at ~12 with Basic, moved to the old VB, I tried C but it was too hard for me at that time. Then came VB .NET, I learned PHP meanwhile which is C friendly, so I moved to C# and then real C when I was older and smart enough to understand the way the machine works (pointers!) I did some microcontroller ASM, like PIC. My answer is "thanks, but no thanks".
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Visual Basic.Net with XNA perhaps? If it helps, I started at BASIC, used the similarities to move to legacy VB, then used the syntax similarities to move to VB.Net. VB.Net and C# both use the .Net framework, so moving from one to the other was just a matter of syntax. C# and C/C++ look similar, so it was fairly simple to migrate there. C/C++ both just compile down to ASM; guess where I'm headed next ;P
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
My eleven years old son's love programming game with RPG Game Maker. It's a programming language build in .NET. It's allow kids to program RPG game using pre-defined objects. Since he programs with Game Maker, my son knows how variables, events, loops, objects, bitmaps, sounds, etc works. I recommend it to everyone!
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
Hi Amarnath, Long ago (1983-1984) I created and ran a computer program at the French-English BiLingual School in San Francisco. We had (what else ?) Apple IIe's, Apple dot-matrix Printers. No network, of course. And, all floppy disks. For nine months I had over two-hundred children per week from age 8 to 16 in and out of the classroom. I started them with Logo, and then I had a kind of "mutiny" by a group of older kids' parents who wanted them to learn Basic, so I threw in Basic. At the end of a year of this I was "burned out," and digusted with the school administration who broke their promise to me that the first year of the program would be for upper school students only (around seventy students total). And of course there were some games that really did require advanced logic from the kids. The younger children could really relate to "turtle graphics" in Logo, and the better of the lower school teachers came up with "turtle dances" which the kids could act out on the playground, then come in and make happen on the computers. Memory of these Apple machines (in Logo) was so puny that any attempt to model a "real-life" scenario : like the kids schedule for a week, would run out of memory. Looking back on this experience, I wonder if I it might not have been much more useful to teach kids real world applications, like a SpreadSheet, a Database, a Word Processor. I wonder if the use of those applications (particularly a spreadsheet with a macro recorder and a macro language) may have more benefit, and certainly require some of the same cognitive skills that programming in a "toy" language like Logo requires. Of course today's machines, with lots of ram and hard disk storage : well, it's a whole other world. In my experience : only one in about ten of the younger children really benefited from the programming aspect, per se. But, among the older students were kids who were already into assembly language on the 6502. One young fourteen year old wizard actually created a "vector font" in Logo which he was able to rotate (yes, he got an "A"). I haven't looked at the educational research on various forms of computer training on younger people in so many years, but I wonder what has, or has not, been found out. The educational research of the time period when I was on the "front lines" was often "cultic" and, imho, biased by the great desire of the researchers to see kids on computers. I went to a convention of computer teachers in schools : I thought I was at a religious rally for St. Seymour P
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
Hi, What children need are well designed problems for them to learn to program. They should increase in difficulty, etc. and be very visual. I've checked out all the stuff on the thread so I hope this is informative. First- "Microworlds" (Logo), devleoped by MIT for children- has many features that are attractive for girls as well as boys. Can have robotics, but has a lot of very visual projects that introduce ideas of OOP. Then try ALICE, developed at Carnegie Mellon- very visual as well, introduction to OOP and I think uses Java. It is real java code,but uses an interface where you pull a correctly written template for a loop for instance. I don't know how old your children are, but most kids aren't ready to program much before 6th grade..(READING is good..Piaget etc-) By way of background I have taught programming to bright and gifted children for many years- had a few eighth graders who even got themselves into C++ in the late 90's and selling shareware on the web. As for the web- html is simple enough that a child could generate a "pick your own ending" story on a website easily and learn some fundamentals of links, images, CSS as you get more complicated. Then, with experience of Java or Java script you could start to make some interactive features.. liz
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
Hi, I tried several tools with my 10 years old son and what he found the best (yes, it should be them, not you :) ) is the Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/[^]. It's is very easy to get started and the programming uses a visual approach. After a while, I could see my son can now understand perfectly the logic of all basic programming structures (loops, ifs, variables, etc). Regards Paulo
------------- Paulo Garcia
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
Checkout Scratch at MIT. http://scratch.mit.edu/ It is a more visual way of dragging and dropping code statements. It is centered around moving sprites arround on the screen. When they are done it will publish there project to the gallary at the Scratch site so they can share there creation with there friends. I found it to incorporate many concepts in ways kids can understand, including xy courdinate and moving sprites, variables, control statements, collision detection, broadcasting/listenting for events. I was able to teach my son concepts of mutlti threading and syncronization because each sprite gets its own script which is running concurrently. By using the event broadcasting and listenting I was able to show him how to sychronize actions between different sprites.
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
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You're skipping a step. You start by finding out if they have any enthusiasm for it and if not, looking for ways to fire that curiosity and passion in them. Without an eager desire on their part, it's just drudgery no different than scraping an old coat of paint off the back fence. In such a case, there is no language or technology on the planet that will make a difference. Once they're interested, however, the rest comes easily.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Got a career question? Ask the Attack Chihuahua!
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
I started with C. I feel it is a good starting place for high level languages. You could even start them on C#. I'm not particularly fond of it, but i think it would make a reasonable starting place by reducing some of the learning curve.
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My eleven years old son's love programming game with RPG Game Maker. It's a programming language build in .NET. It's allow kids to program RPG game using pre-defined objects. Since he programs with Game Maker, my son knows how variables, events, loops, objects, bitmaps, sounds, etc works. I recommend it to everyone!
A great place to start is Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/ . It is a visual programming language developed by MIT that consists of stacking objects that look like Legos to create your program flow. My 9 year old son has been programming in it for 2 years and loves it. It is great for teaching them the visualization and logic needed to program in any language. There is a website dedicated to sharing your programs with others and getting feedback.
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
I faced the same problem about a year ago with my 12-year-old and 9-year-old. Programming with C was too daunting for them. Too much to learn before they could do anything useful. Look for a program called Scratch. It was developed by MIT to stimulate interest in programming in children. I am pretty critical of programming tools, but Scratch is an impressive achievement. It is also free. It allows kids to become familiar with variables, if-else, loops while doing it in a drag-and-drop format so that the kids don't get bogged down in syntax. I would highly recommend it. My kids did all sorts of animated movies and games. It has a lot of pre-packaged routines for animations and graphics, all of which are graphical. You can find it at http://scratch.mit.edu/
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what about the lego robot stuff.
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Maximilien wrote:
what about the lego robot stuff.
Agreed. Start with the visual programming language for the NXT, then move to a c-based language: NXC. There are dozens of NXT programming invironments out there, for all sorts of languages. NXT-G, C, Java, etc. It's a great plave to start. Have a nice day, ~Sidneys1
Always trying to help, Sidneys1
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath
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How do I start my two daughters on programming - their ages are 11 and 8. The elder one knows how to browse the Internet. Long back, when I started with Fortran IV, it was pretty easy. But now, where to start? I think it should be C (leaving pointers aside), but give your thoughts. - Amarnath