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Friday November 12, 2004

Programming for Kids

What's the best way of teaching young (6 to 8 year) children about programming?
This just came up on an internal mailing list, so I thought I'd blog about it. I'm also hoping that others will comment on what they've used, and I'll update this post with those suggestions.

Here's the list of resources that I've squirreled away over the years (largely from a similar thread on a distributed objects mailing list). Note that not all of these are applicable to kids at quite that young an age, but this hopefully is still useful.

Software:

Books:

Turtle Geometry by Abelson and diSessa.

Others:

Comment from Bob Haugen:
Klik'N-Play, which I don't think you can get any more. Brilliantly simple, designed around an event-action editor. It morphed into something called Multimedia Fusion which is not really better, just more complicated. But still good.
Comment from Mark Thomsen:
Maybe chase other links from Papert
Comment from Doug Lea:
Along with Lego mindstorms, one of the best introductions to programming-as-problem-solving is The Incredible Machine PC game. You visually program/build Rube-Goldberg-ish physical contraptions that solve various problems. There have been a series of these games by Sierra.
Comment from Kevin Smith:
To be controversial, I will suggest something rather un-academic. Many modern video games have amazing programming environments that allow you to build your own games using the engine and graphics libraries provided. For example, Bioware's Neverwinter Nights toolset includes a very C-like scripting language that allows you to control the characters in the game, who are represented as objects (simple events can be defined to communicate between objects).
Comment from Ken: When I was a kid, I loved Robot Odyssey. Best ... Game ... Ever.
Comment from Hal: I learned BASIC at the age of about 8 mostly to program lame games as the ZXSpectrum was affordable (just) whereas the Atari 2600 wasn't.
Teaching Kids Programming. Multiple resources and links.