What Language for a kid

[Matt Minuti]

I have to agree with David here, except mindstorms is pretty awful, unless
the only concepts you're looking for are simple loops, do...while, and
conditionals, all mostly independent. It used to be based b some MIT stuff
and was scratch-like, but it's been LabVIEW since the NXT. The current
version, EV3, is also LabVIEW, though the brick itself runs Debian.
Ironically, there's no Linux support for the software. But for the absolute
basics, it's not bad, just don't try to do stuff with variables or you'll
pull your hair out.

There's a way to get scratch to talk to Lego WeDo stuff (the kernel
driver's been around forever), and arduino too. Might be offline version
only, or scratch 1 and not scratch 2, but I don't know. I left that job
before I had the chance to switch them to Linux :P
On Dec 23, 2015 9:38 PM, "David Rysdam" <david at rysdam.org> wrote:

> Paul Beaudet <inof8or at gmail.com> writes:
> > One thing I really want to recommend against is scratch or mindstorm. I
> > think they are both really fun and all, but no one that solely uses
> > graphical code block type systems self identify as a programmer or has
> > confidence to tackle issues that involve code. Honestly it defeats the
> > whole point of the exposure by making code look like a toy.
>
> No, sorry, I have to completely disagree with this. "Doesn't look like
> code" has nothing to do with anything.
>
> What Scratch is great at is abstracting "how do I describe and debug an
> algorithm" out from "how do I speak in this weird language and use these
> weird tools". Teaching someone to program has nothing to do with how to
> format Python/C/Java/Lisp code. Using pre-formatted blocks is a great
> way to introduce those real fundamentals.
>
> It is absolutely true (so far) that if you want to write "real" programs
> you have to move beyond Scratch. But that doesn't make it a bad place to
> start. But it is also true that if you want to write "real" programs,
> just typing well-formatted C isn't enough--you have to understand when
> and how to use conditionals, loops, functions and data structures.
>
> For some people, using the tools is the fun part and if they happen to
> learn some concepts that's a bonus. Those people might want to start
> with Python or even C. Other people are interested in the concepts but
> struggling with the tools is the barrier. For those people, Scratch is a
> great introduction.
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