Comment Re:Ease in with scratch (Score 1) 799
Scratch!
How To Teach a 12-Year-Old To Program? 799
thelordx writes "I've got a much younger brother who I'd like to teach how to program. When I was younger, you'd often start off with something like BASIC or Apple BASIC, maybe move on to Pascal, and eventually get to C and Java. Is something like Pascal still a dominant teaching language? I'd love to get low-level with him, and I firmly believe that C is the best language to eventually learn, but I'm not sure how to get him there. Can anyone recommend a language I can start to teach him that is simple enough to learn quickly, but powerful enough to do interesting things and lead him down a path towards C/C++?"
Comment Re:scratch (Score 4, Interesting) 634
I'm a father of three and a college professor teaching computer programming, and I've found that Scratch is a very good "language" for teaching programming. It shows programming concepts such as looping, variables and interfaces in an immediately accessible and kid-friendly manner. It includes multimedia and event-driven programming capabilities. It uses the best features of immediate feedback of success and visible results to encourage exploration and fun.
Programming in Scratch helps kids
- start simple and do complicated things later
- create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web
- jump right in and understand the basics like variables, loops, arrays, etc, without getting bogged down in an over complex or restrictive language
- learn to program by diving in and doing it
- impress their friends
During the directed learning that takes place in a Scratch-oriented curriculum, the teaching team can introduce another programming language to show how syntax-oriented programming languages can perform the same tasks as the graphics-oriented systems. Any programming language can serve as that second language.
I find it a bit ironic that the best language for teaching programming languages isn't a language at all.
Comment Re:Tyson (Score 3, Informative) 799
Tyson gets my vote, too, but my kids like: Bill Nye the Science Guy, Beakman (from Beakman's World), Alton Brown.
Tomorrow's Science Heroes? 799
An anonymous reader writes "As a kid I was (and still am) heavily influenced by Carl Sagan, and a little later by Stephen Hawking. Now as I have started a family with two kids, currently age 5 and 2, I am wondering who out there is popularizing science. Currently, my wife and I can get the kids excited about the world around them, but I'd like to find someone inspiring from outside the family as they get older. Sure, we'll always have 'Cosmos,' but are there any contemporaries who are trying to bring science into the public view in such a fun and intriguing way? Someone the kids can look up to and be inspired by? Where is the next Science Hero?"
Comment Casting (Score 1) 290
The next MacGyver should be played by Ellen Page.
