Re: [school-discuss] ISO: Good programming language to teach an 8yr

[Daniel Taylor <danielt@danielt.com>]

Bill Kendrick wrote:
> What's a good, kid-friendly language for today's kids to use (on Linux,
> of course!)?
I would try Java, it might be a bit hard to learn for an eight 
year old, but there is a nice way to learn Java and have fun at 
the same time...

http://robocode.alphaworks.ibm.com/home/home.html

Not had much time to play about with it, but it looks good.

As other's have noted, LOGO is quite good, but he might be a 
little to old for that now. I know it was quite boring for me 
when I was forced to learn it in high school. (although I was 
coding with higher level programming languages at the time, so 
maybe I was just being to picky).

I think games like RoboCode is a good teaching aid.

I would also check out Python and Pygame.

Hope that helps.