Comment Re:good beginning language (Score 1) 475
robbieduncan wrote:
>Almost no languages have been designed [as a beginner's language]
LOGO stands out as the best learning language, IMO. Read papers on educational design or download the software (freeware or commercial) from The Logo Foundation.
The Logo programming environments have been developed over the past 28 years.
Some say "oh, its a baby language."
I disagree. I've taught programming to scores of children in several countries. Kids can understand programming right away by seeing the LOGO turtle respond to
But they also can grow with the language and
learn debugging, recursion, AI, arrays, stacks, sorting functions, etc...
I've learned over a dozen computer languages, (LOGO was my fourth). But I really started to enjoy programming one summer when I created my own shoot-em-up game in Logo and helped a 12 year program a Chess game in that 'baby language'.
python's interactive prompt will be helpful to beginners. It's object and package system is easy to understand. It is less complex than perl. I think its a decent choice and with a good teacher kids can learn in any language. But python is designed to be a clear, object-oriented scripting language, while LOGO has 28 years of depth in education.
Good luck to this project! TMTOWTE (E is for Educate)
>Almost no languages have been designed [as a beginner's language]
LOGO stands out as the best learning language, IMO. Read papers on educational design or download the software (freeware or commercial) from The Logo Foundation.
The Logo programming environments have been developed over the past 28 years.
Some say "oh, its a baby language."
I disagree. I've taught programming to scores of children in several countries. Kids can understand programming right away by seeing the LOGO turtle respond to
TELL TURTLE 0 RIGHT 90
But they also can grow with the language and
learn debugging, recursion, AI, arrays, stacks, sorting functions, etc...
I've learned over a dozen computer languages, (LOGO was my fourth). But I really started to enjoy programming one summer when I created my own shoot-em-up game in Logo and helped a 12 year program a Chess game in that 'baby language'.
python's interactive prompt will be helpful to beginners. It's object and package system is easy to understand. It is less complex than perl. I think its a decent choice and with a good teacher kids can learn in any language. But python is designed to be a clear, object-oriented scripting language, while LOGO has 28 years of depth in education.
Good luck to this project! TMTOWTE (E is for Educate)
