
Teaching Computing with... Computers? - pchristensen
http://www.bogost.com/blog/teaching_computing_with_comput.shtml
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anigbrowl
What, no comments? Both sides have some valid points. From the NSF point of
view, it is hard to teach abstraction and they also want to develop teaching
materials that don't rely on expensive and proprietary educational toys. Then
again Bogost reasonably asks how you can expect kids to stick with the program
when you move from the toy to a screen of code.

I wish he had explored his alternative ideas further (although the comments do
pick up where he left off). Computer games can definitely be used to teach
basic concepts, and indeed some very good games have used programming-type
puzzles as part of the gameplay.

A kid-friendly programming interface, to me, could just be a skin on a full
programming environment. As you would complete basic programming tasks, you
could then unlock higher level features.

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hc
this sounds like the "new math"... why not start young children with actual
programming? programming is _easier_ and more intuitive than thinking
abstractly about algorithms and compression

