

Teaching Kids Programming - baha_man
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/05/teaching-kids-programming.html

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danteembermage
If you've never tried out scratch before it is really fun. I've been making
games with my 11 and 14 year old brother this year; they've gotten excited
about programming because you get really immediate results. The code looks
like multicolored nested C-clamps which you pull off a menu from the side; no
typing required. So far we've made whack-a-mole, an asteroid space shooter,
and some other random half projects.

Now if they made a scratch to AS3 compiler that would really be something; the
games do run as java applets but I think they would be a lot more excited if
they saw their game on Kongregate.

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astine
Bah! Fie on these fancy toys. I learned to program at aged nine using Pascal.
My first serious program was an addition driller which I then used.

Seriously, I moved into Mindstorms later when I was in middle school and was
really disappointed by the limitedness of the blocks 'language.'

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henning
Keep these kids far away from the Joel on Software crowd, they'd have these
kids doing nothing but creating UML diagrams, doing "OO design" that isn't
really OO, and writing stored procedures for SQL Server, in the name of like,
being "pragmatic" or some bullshit.

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astrec
I'm a big fan of Alice. Apparently there is a version targeting younger kids -
Storytelling Alice (<http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/index.html>)

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nertzy
_why's Hackety Hack is a good introduction for kids that involves doing real
things like pulling information off of web pages and making blogs.

<http://hacketyhack.net/>

