Computer Programming for Kids: Help Needed

Free Republic ^ | 10/13/02 | self

[MoralSense]

My eight-year-old son is interested in computer programming. We went to Barnes & Noble yesterday, looking for some book (perhaps including CD or disk) written at his level, maybe a Basic book and compiler, something like that. And there really was nothing. We came home with a large book that shows how to create Lego robots with Mindstorm, but it really doesn't fill the bill.

What he needs is just some introduction to writing code, seeing how it works, line by line, getting some quick results. Any ideas or resources? Thanks.

[Abcdefg]

Amazon promotes pedophilia, even against it's own financial interests. We don't recommend it around here.

[Abcdefg]

There's a freebie out there called LCC-Win32 and a newsgroup that has an excellent tutorial on the C language and excellent documentation. It has a wizard for creating Windows GUI based applications.

[Abcdefg]

Sorry, the docs and tutorial are available on the web site AND there is a newsgroup with lots of support.

[meia]

Look for books on Liberty Basic. You can download the software for about 30 bucks on the internet. Works great. Good for beginners.

[American Preservative]

FR Topic Bump List (Scroll down to tech index and click)

[lelio]

If your son was older (late teens) I would say start with Java as its The Programming Language of The Future (tm), but its object oriented concepts can be hard to grasp.
I would recommend perl as you can either do procedural (ie run code from top to bottom of the page) or OO.
Plus there are a ton of books on it it B&N, even a learning one too.

[bert]

Don't be afraid to let him be heavily challenged. OTH, don't force him where he really doesn't want to go.

Rigor is good

[FITZ]

In my opinion that is far too much for an 8 year old to start with. I would recommend something far simpler and easier to understand like MS Quick Basic or even QBasic.

I agree. An 8 year old can easily learn simple programming ---make a program that asks questions and does different things with different answers. My kids learn that stuff early and it might seem too easy but it gives them an idea of the basic idea behind computer programming.

[jmax]

Suggest you go (don't call) to your local JUNIOR / COMMUNITY College and talk to the senior computer instructor. Don't go to a 4 year college, as they normally don't have the time (or ambition) to help with a "local" problem, like this.

[jz638]

The important part of learning computer programming isn't the language or the syntax, it's the logic behind it. Having a child understand preconditions, assertions, and conditional statements is invaluable to him, and will probably put him in a league above most of his teachers.

Personally, I'd say VB is the easiest language to work with for a youngster. The biggest pro is the easy to use form objects. Drag and drop is fun (even for us bigger kids), it's almost like painting. The code syntax is also pretty straightforward (code is pretty easy to read by people who don't know programming)

In fact, I've more than once looked at some consultant written VB code that I swear was written by an 8-year-old child, but ugly as it was, much of it did work. Whatever language your son ends up with, make sure it can be fun. The frustration factor is the biggest reason that most people quit trying to learn computer programming.

[wafflehouse]

well, i dont know where you are starting from, but as a very beginning type of activity, you can start with plain ol' HTML.. have a page open in explorer and have the source open in notepad.. you can change and save the code and see the results immediately when you refresh the page.. and html is very basic.. i started with Quick Basic myself.. i would also recommend that as a starter, although kids today probably want some fancy windows bells-and-whistles type stuff.. you could probably find Qbasic somewhere to download.. i know i have a copy of it somewhere..

[Vince Ferrer]

Squeak is a Smalltalk language environment designed to teach children programming. It is much easier to learn than Java, Pascal, or any of the other languages mentioned. It is free, you can download it here:

Squeak

[MoralSense]

This particular B & N had several "Dummies" books, but certainly did not have the one on Basic (thank you). The ones in stock were mostly how-to's for using various applications.

[oct11]

Below there's a link to a book at amazon.com to get you started.

The nice features at amazon.com are the links to other books from each book's page -- so you can browse -- as well as the customer reviews.

Beginning Programming for Dummies

[jz638]

as pointed out by another poster, HTML is good too. Cheap (I'd bet you could find a HTML book at a yardsale for a quarter), fast and easy. If he wanted to, he could get a geocities or tripod page and show his work off to his friends.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks for the ping!

Good list of resources here!

[neutrino]

But there's no need to start with OO; one can dump everything into main, if they wish. Then, after they learn seqential coding, they can address objects.

PERL is nice, and it's certainly popular in CGI scripts - and for hacking - but Java really does have a lot of merit IMO.

Here's a super-simple program; the part I wrote is in blue.

public class Sample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        for(int i = 0;i<5;i++){
        System.out.println("This is loop " + i);
        }
    }
}

This one prints a message 5 times; with a little work, one could have it read from or write to a file. Don't let him create an endless loop that writes to a file - that's A Very Bad Thing! (Grin)

I'm sure he could handle that, with no problem at all!

[VOA]

bump for future read

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Speaking of LOGO, thinking Lego stumbled onto this:

Unbelievable ---With the exception of the wire strings, this instrument is entirely constructed out of LEGO parts

[hosepipe]

'What he needs is just some introduction to writing code, seeing how it works, line by line, getting some quick results. Any ideas or resources? Thanks."

As a 35+yr programmer I would say. Let him study HTML, many sources on the net. Studing what a webssite is and playing with HTML instuctions. Easy to do, and will give you and him the ability to determine whether its just a whim or not... Would for YOU and him... If hes stable and still interested studying Java and/or Perl (after an appropriate learning curve) would be good for you both..

After that a version of "C" would start him out...to real programming...