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September 23, 2004
Teaching kids to code
Back in the days of yore, I learnt to program by tapping endless lines of BASIC into my VIC-20 and sitting through LOGO and PASCAL classes at school (this was the early 80's - remember). So, now my son Christopher turns 10 this year and will be getting his own PC. To date he has been more interested in playing on the PC than finding out "how the stuff works". But that seems to be slowly changing. Looking at the bloated development IDEs that are common today, I think the multitude of functions are probably too daunting for "first steps". So, what other suggestions do you have for starting kids on programming? My email address is on the left or you can link to this article. I'll find you.
Update: Already, suggestions are coming in. I'll keep track here:
Frank and Sylvain recommend BlueJ
Sylvain also points to DarkBasic and BlitzBasic. These look to be more geared towards Game programming.
Frank sent me an email and points to Squeak.
More links courtesy of the guys on #mobitopia: Python in education. IBM has Robocode for programming Java "robots".
Posted by Matthew at September 23, 2004 09:51 AM