Reply to: Recommendations for children interested in programming

[doodab]

I should have added: Of those here who learned to program as a child, who didn't learn using BASIC?

+1 for me.

And on the speccy at least hand rolling some assembly, using POKE to load bytes into memory and then using USR to execute the code was pretty close to the machine. The original spectrum manual was a great book.

[Diver]

Another vote for Mindstorms. It combines Lego technics model building with sophisticated plug and play hardware and an easy to learn NXT-G programming language with the option to move onto other languages if you like.

The programming language is drag and drop with blocks, the basic stuff is pretty easy with loops and conditional statements but you can create subroutines and do a lot of advanced stuff too. Build a machine and then spend hours programming it to do clever stuff and making hardware mods. It helps the kids learn logic, process flow as well as mechanical engineering and design. Have a look at this demo of the programming language or the Mindstorms website. Once you grow out of NXT-G, you can use any of a number of other programming languages to do more complex stuff till your heart's content.

My son and I have a lot of fun with Mindstorms and it's a great thing to do together, learning the fundamentals.

Brilliant!
I wish I had the time to play with this myself

[Wanderer]

The kit that it comes with is visual MatLab, but there's APIs for it in almost every language you want.

Another vote for Mindstorms. It combines Lego technics model building with sophisticated plug and play hardware and an easy to learn NXT-G programming language with the option to move onto other languages if you like.

The programming language is drag and drop with blocks, the basic stuff is pretty easy with loops and conditional statements but you can create subroutines and do a lot of advanced stuff too. Build a machine and then spend hours programming it to do clever stuff and making hardware mods. It helps the kids learn logic, process flow as well as mechanical engineering and design. Have a look at this demo of the programming language or the Mindstorms website. Once you grow out of NXT-G, you can use any of a number of other programming languages to do more complex stuff till your heart's content.

My son and I have a lot of fun with Mindstorms and it's a great thing to do together, learning the fundamentals.

[yasockie]

What's the programming side of that like?

The kit that it comes with is visual MatLab, but there's APIs for it in almost every language you want.

[Freamon]

Just point them at this: Code Year

[Spacecadet]

The idea of teaching anybody, whatever their age, BASIC in 2012 is just bizarre. If they expressed an interest in cars, you wouldn't start them off with a Model T Ford: not only is it outdated and irrelevant, but so much about it from the way it starts to the way you control the gears is completely unlike any car made in the last fifty years. So it is with BASIC.

Why is it that just about every argument about computers has to have someone using a rubbish car analogy? Stop it NOW.

BASIC is as fine a language as any for teaching a kid who is getting interested in programming. In fact, given that the B is for Beginners it could be better suited than some others.

Having said that, something like lego mindstorm which Durbs suggested is perfect. Its the modern equivalent of the turtle and translates what happens in the abstract world of the computer to the physical world which the child has experience in.

I should have added: Of those here who learned to program as a child, who didn't learn using BASIC?

[VectraMan]

Python doesn't have proper strong typing, which is a useful thing to learn in itself. The syntax is also pretty horrible, and unlike most other languages, and have you tried explaining to a newbie computer user why their program no longer works because they used the wrong editor and it inserted a space instead of a tab?

I would start them off with C#.

[d000hg]

I don't know, I've worked in the games industry, the banking industry and the transport industry and never seen any Python code beyond a few little utility scripts.

And we all know, thanks to minestrone, that a web-crawler is just a hundred lines of code anyway

Py may be used in a large number of places but it' still tiny as a percentage. I'd bet VB is still used on way more projects. In fact I bet VB is still used on way more NEW projects. I'd even go so far - though with higher uncertainty - to guess VB6 is used in more projects than Python. Sad as it may be

Anyway in my book you should learn Python (or Ruby or whatever) after learning some basics so you understand how much nicer the high-level-language is, and what it is doing for you.

[NickFitz]

Python is used in loads of places but it's still a tiny minority language. It seems to be one of those technologies which is wonderful but couldn't get mainstream, like D.

I don't think the language that runs the most-used web site in the world can fairly be described as a tiny minority language.

In fact, looking at geeks I know around the world, Python is probably the most commonly-used language between them. Perhaps it's the circles you move in that constitute the minority?

[russell]

Then use LOGO

Python is used all over the place. Industrial Light & Magic and Disney/Pixar both use it in their respective animation infrastructures. Los Alamos National Labs use it for large-scale physics simulations, while Lawrence Livermore National Labs use it for numerical engineering. The US National Weather Service use it for almost all of their work. NASA's Mission Control Center uses it. The CIA web site runs on it.

Oh, and some outfit called Google do a heck of a lot of stuff in it, including their web crawler and most of their search infrastructure. Their video-sharing web site YouTube is also written in Python. Guido van Rossum, creator and maintainer of Python, works at Google.

There's loads more if you look.

I love Python also , not sure about 3 though seems to be taking a long time for people to migrate. I love some of the micro web frameworks like bottle and flask, refreshing when you've been using ASP.NET. I guess the only criticism is performance and it's lack of multithreading natively but Im sure these will fixed or less important.

[d000hg]

Python is used in loads of places but it's still a tiny minority language. It seems to be one of those technologies which is wonderful but couldn't get mainstream, like D.

[NickFitz]

You're right Nick we shouldn't be using a niche language to teach kids. So that's Python out of contention

I still absolutely don't buy your argument that simply because people don't write serious code in BASIC, that means it's bad as a tool to learn the basics. The point is to get them interested and teach them how to think. LOGO is as good as anything else at that age.

Then use LOGO

Python is used all over the place. Industrial Light & Magic and Disney/Pixar both use it in their respective animation infrastructures. Los Alamos National Labs use it for large-scale physics simulations, while Lawrence Livermore National Labs use it for numerical engineering. The US National Weather Service use it for almost all of their work. NASA's Mission Control Center uses it. The CIA web site runs on it.

Oh, and some outfit called Google do a heck of a lot of stuff in it, including their web crawler and most of their search infrastructure. Their video-sharing web site YouTube is also written in Python. Guido van Rossum, creator and maintainer of Python, works at Google.

There's loads more if you look.

[bobspud]

Start them on C or it's a waste of time. Close to the machine so they understand how a computer works.

Oh crap I am finding myself agreeing with this man

[russell]

I don't know that I'd consider VB to be BASIC, there's a lot more to confuse people with And as for VB.net, definitely not. I mean good old-fashioned BASIC with line numbers, as being the simplest language you can actually write something in.

I thought we wanted to teach them low-level "how the computer works" stuff? That's what GOTO is, it my instill bad programming habits but it also is a fundamental part of knowing what a C function does.

The whole GOTO is bad in all circumstances thing is overdone. Agreed using goto's all over the place is bad but they can be useful in C for example in Macros for error handling.

It't like the statement that programmers can't be trusted to manage memory or forcing everything into a object oriented paradigm. Use the best keyword/language/paradigm for the job.

[d000hg]

You're right Nick we shouldn't be using a niche language to teach kids. So that's Python out of contention

I still absolutely don't buy your argument that simply because people don't write serious code in BASIC, that means it's bad as a tool to learn the basics. The point is to get them interested and teach them how to think. LOGO is as good as anything else at that age.