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How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

blog.makewonder.com

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Re: How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

#81

Post by Secretmapper »

I fully agree with the sentiments here. For all intents and purposes, I think that block style languages might not be the best way to introduce programming - I'll have to say that Bret Victor's Learnable Programming makes much more sense (http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/)

However, there is no (to my knowledge) better way to introduce programming in an easy 'non-keyboard' way than blocks. I ask this because I'm currently brainstorming ideas for tux4kids (an open source educational suite for kids - yes tux as in the linux mascot), and we've come to the conclusion of using block structures (since the game has to be playable for mobile too). Unfortunately, we've come no better than 'move here, use functions' a la Lightbot (lightbot.com)

It's quite timely that this has been posted here, since we're still brainstorming concepts and I wanted to take this opportunity to ask - what would you suggest for a 'programming game' for kids?

Re: How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

#82

Post by drewlarsen »

chongli wrote: post #31
kzhahou wrote: post #23

Why is BASIC totally left out? An entire generation was inspired by power-on basic in C64 and other platforms. More than just "inspired"... Some huge amount of today's technology wouldn't exist otherwise. I know I'm stuck in the past, but that's what I want for my kids. Flip open the laptop and boom, theres my programming environment, except now with easier graphics/sound APIs. Anyone know how to get this, without bu…

It's really hard to do something like that with kids today. They have so many options now between consoles, iPads, etc. There's way too much instant gratification. You're never again going to see a generation that has the patience to type in the source code to a game published in a magazine.

Untrue, at least in the case of my 9 year old. He loves writing Javascript "apps" from bitsbox (bitsbox.com). I learned by poke'ing on an Apple ][ because that was the tech of the day. Apps are the tech of the day for kids and he loves seeing the things he can create.

Re: How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

#83

Post by sbuttgereit »

kzhahou wrote: post #23

Why is BASIC totally left out? An entire generation was inspired by power-on basic in C64 and other platforms. More than just "inspired"... Some huge amount of today's technology wouldn't exist otherwise. I know I'm stuck in the past, but that's what I want for my kids. Flip open the laptop and boom, theres my programming environment, except now with easier graphics/sound APIs. Anyone know how to get this, without bu…

One of the great things about C64 BASIC was that it didn't do too much hand holding. It had syntactic simplicity, but you had to deal with the underlying machine. Want to draw a circle? There was no "circle" command, you had do the math and flip bits with peeks & pokes & apply Boolean logic to retrieved values.

As a kid ~12 or so programming the C64, that did a few things that I think languages like those being presented here miss: 1) the computer didn't talk down to me as "being for kids", yet was simple enough to get me started without large amounts of previous technological background required; 2) the computer had more advanced capabilities that I could tackle as I gained experience (i.e. the aforementioned having to deal with memory manipulation); 3) Because it wasn't built for me (a kid), it didn't have to pretend to keep me entertained... there was a mystery to it all that as I progressed, I became more ensconced in deeper levels of knowledge that was earned, not given.

Sure I wasn't doing brain surgery, or even software engineering, but those early lessons gave me the fundamentals of why certain things mattered and how to solve problems that weren't child proofed.

Re: How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

#84

Post by evv555 »

unabst wrote: post #70

Having animals and colorful bricks is okay, so long as we're not in conflict with what is actually fun about what is being taught here... Programming is fun because we can control the machine, and make it do things... magically, at our whim, with the right combination of instructions. So compared to that, having a cat walk towards a barn seems like a completely irrelevant layer of entertainment forcefully tailored to…

>So compared to that, having a cat walk towards a barn seems like a completely irrelevant layer of entertainment forcefully tailored to the taste of the students, who at best are distracted from the real fun, or at worst presumed to be incapable of understanding why programming itself might be fun.

The turtle/cat is a concrete place holder for abstractions like state and variables. Being able to to grasp algebraic variables and other high level abstractions is correlated with Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development which most children only begin entering in middle school. You probably could teach a 9 year old programming without these training wheels in the same sense that you could probably teach them algebra.

Re: How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

#85

Post by sbuttgereit »

biot wrote: post #45
kzhahou wrote: post #23

Why is BASIC totally left out? An entire generation was inspired by power-on basic in C64 and other platforms. More than just "inspired"... Some huge amount of today's technology wouldn't exist otherwise. I know I'm stuck in the past, but that's what I want for my kids. Flip open the laptop and boom, theres my programming environment, except now with easier graphics/sound APIs. Anyone know how to get this, without bu…

A tad more complicated than C64 BASIC, but: http://www.templeos.org/ Terry Davis (creator) likens it to the C64, though you're writing in CPP/ASM: "The vision for TempleOS, however, is a modern, 64-bit Commodore 64. The C64 was a non-networked, home computer mostly used for games. It trained my generation how to program because it was wide open, completely hackable. The games were not multimedia works of art, but gen…

That is awesome. I always joked with my wife that if we ever get our kid a computer early on, it wouldn't be an iPad, etc. that I'd figure out how to only give him exactly the sort of thing I had when I was a kid (a C64) and if figured that out, he'd be OK. The joke now becomes reality! :-P

Re: How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

#86

Post by harryf »

This ignores Minecraft and things like Scriptcraft ( http://scriptcraftjs.org ) which I've found are far more effective at home my kids attention than Scratch. Scratch is nice but IMO the end result is too limited - kids sense their program is "stuck" inside the window of the Scratch environment and is missing out on much of what the computer is capable of.

Re: How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

#87

Post by greendestiny »

harryf wrote: post #86

This ignores Minecraft and things like Scriptcraft ( http://scriptcraftjs.org ) which I've found are far more effective at home my kids attention than Scratch. Scratch is nice but IMO the end result is too limited - kids sense their program is "stuck" inside the window of the Scratch environment and is missing out on much of what the computer is capable of.

Yeah I just introduced my kids to http://computercraftedu.com/ and its visual minecraft programming language. They got the hang of it quickly because they really want to create things in minecraft.

Re: How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

#88

Post by kevhito »

unabst wrote: post #79
kevhito wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you programmed in scratch for any significant amount of time? I have, so have my kids, and as a CS prof (at a small non-engineering college) I encourage my students to do so too. Before age 10, almost entirely on their own, my kids discovered ideas like abstraction (writing custom blocks), recursion, data representation (e.g. encoding/decoding pairs, structs and lists into arbitrary-precision integers), asynchro…

I was trying to be careful not to do that, and you'll see that I didn't. So long as we're not in conflict it's okay, and certainly Scratch is more than cats and barns. But my point remains that cats and barns could be interpreted as "fun because they're kids" since no CS prof in their right mind would teach students that way at, say, MIT. Maybe robots. The problem isn't with teachers who teach the magic of computers…

Yes, perhaps I was being a bit unfair.

However, bad teachers will always be with us, and won't start teaching the magic of computers just because you give them a c64 or basic. They'll just make kids write endless employee pay calculator programs and other drudgery.

I do agree with your general sentiment about the transparency of "intent to entertain". But I really don't see it with scratch. There's a silly cat on the front page, and comic-book logos. But 5 minutes after first being introduced to that, kids are already looking at Griffpatch's latest multi-player cloud-based platformer, or the cool 3d render program, or the interactive fractal, or the simulated ice-cream shop factory, then 5 minutes later they are staring at code trying to figure out how they did it so they can make their own. Really. On the frontpage right now, the top-featured studio (i.e. a collective hacking club) is called "Lindenmayer Systems!" [1], showing their latest L-system fractal fern generator [2]. I really don't see a lot of "forcefully tailored" entertainment here. Just a site filled with projects made by kids and adults on a huge range of topics, from lipstick, fashion and silly greeting cards, to mathematical and engineering.

Incidentally, I'm assuming you know scratch was designed at MIT, and many aspects were deliberately designed to teach advanced concepts. And that it has, in fact, been used in college classrooms (Harvard [2], others I believe). Still, I contend that my kids with no formal CS education have a far better concept of an abstract data type because of scratch sprites, and this has carried over very naturally to other languages (Java objects, smalltalk message passing, etc.).

[1]: https://scratch.mit.edu/studios/1677151/ [2]: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1318150/#editor [3]: http://paradox1x.org/2011/11/introducing-programming-in-coll...

Re: How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

#89

Post by dpcan »

I built an online IDE for creating HTML5 games in Javascript that is perfect for the classroom. Then I taught a class using just Javascript and HTML5 Canvas to 11 year old kids in my son's class.

They were fully capable of using straight black-and-white code to get things done. And they were thrilled to see their colorful results on the screen. Learning how to clear the background with different colors got them pumped. Drawing circles and moving them across the canvas was an actual thrill.

After only an hour, I lost control. They were off trying to make their programs do great things without me. They were trying and failing, and then succeeding, on their own. I was running around the classroom helping them figure out little syntax issues so they could keep going, and everyone was having a blast.

One kid would get his program to do something strange, and he'd call everyone over, and everyone would ask "how'd you do that!?" and he would become the teacher for a moment - and the kids would run off and keep trying new things.

There is just something magical about going from plain text to a working program. Writing "DrawCircle 10,10,50" to draw a circle is pure awesome. When you are learning - this makes you feel like a real hacker. You take this kind of thing home and blow the socks off mom and dad too.

Side-note, before I created my little web-IDE for this class, I looked at a bunch of these kid-style languages. I opted for straight code because I remembered my own beginnings. I used QBasic for everything, but when it came time to learn more advanced programming, I struggled for too long because of it. I didn't want my kids growing up like I did, not knowing what to do without GOTO. I didn't want them not knowing what to do if they couldn't drag and drop an IF block into their IDE.

Re: How computer programming languages for kids have evolved and where they're going

#90

Post by srdeveng »

My introduction to markup was the Geocities era HTML. I was in 3rd grade or so at the time.

Got access to my dad's Casio digital camera and took pictures of my friends and teachers and then swapped heads and bodies using Kidpix.

In computer lab, I'd set the start page on the few computers with internet to my Geocities page. It was a huge hit and the computer teacher didn't know whether to applaud or punish me for the work.

I got cut off from the 'internet computers' indefinately and played Organ trail everyday instead of doing the typing assignments since I was already proficient.

I think a large part of my comfort with code came from getting rid of the 'curly brace phobia'. I've attributed my comfort reading code regardless of language at an early age to this exposure to HTML markup.

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