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

[Jason Lai <jmlai@uci.edu>]

Hello. I started programming at around 8 years old myself and now, a 
decade later, I'm a freshman majoring in Information and Computer 
Science. This is all of course just my personal experience and opinion, 
especially since I'm not an educator. And 8-year-olds nowadays seem a 
lot smarter than ten years ago.

Logo was probably my first scripting "language". School taught it in 
second grade. It was interesting for about an hour and got boring quickly.

My first real scripting was with HyperCard and its scripting language 
HyperTalk. That's probably where I've spent the most time playing around 
with in the last ten years. The natural language-ish programming made it 
easy to learn, and it was incredibly easy to script the user interface. 
You could write some pretty neat games with it, but you can also do some 
nice database-like things with little effort (HyperCard is essentially a 
visual, programmable database.)

HyperCard has since died out. The Hypercard clones like Metacard are 
still around, and Metacard runs on Linux I think (not sure if it's just 
the player), but they cost $$$. I think it'd be awesome if there were a 
(working), open-source Hypercard clone, including HyperTalk. As far as I 
know, there aren't any near completion.

PythonCard looks promising, but it still looks like something for older 
kids (middle to high school.) But hey, the kid you're tutoring may be 
smart enough to figure it out.

I'd recommend Python over any of the traditional languages like C/C++ 
and Java (or in my case, my first "real" language was Pascal) but it's 
still somewhat of a leap over simpler languages like HyperTalk or BASIC.

And then there's the issue of how to make it interesting. I wanted to 
write games in Pascal but my dad said, no, you have to learn math and 
pointers and system calls and all that other stuff. So my Pascal games 
ended up being primitive text adventures (first just numbered menu 
items, and eventually one-word commands). Which was fine, because I was 
still playing text adventures at the time and they weren't completely 
dead and out of fashion as they are now. Am I old enough yet to say that 
kids nowadays are spoiled by fancy computer and video games?

Maybe geeks still get a kick out of printing "Hello World" and printing 
out the fibonacci sequence.

Hope at least something in the above helps,

 - Jason Lai

Bill Kendrick wrote:
>What's a good, kid-friendly language for today's kids to use (on Linux,
of course!)?