What Language for a kid

[Bill Freeman]

I think that you should consult the child as to whether she:
  1. Wants to make the computer do stuff beyond playing games and typing
term papers;
  2. Is thinking along the lines of joining a FIRST team and contributing
to the software;
  3. Wants to build her own robot or similar;
  4. Wants to better understand what Dad does;
  5. Wants a leg up for school, eventually college, computer courses/labs,
ability to write tools to do calculations on data from a schools assigned
experiment;
  6. Some combination.
You don't have to get very far down that list before a graphical drag and
drop environment is going to start to feel confining.
Not that you can't start there.  I only have graphical programming with
LavView, but I suspect that the skills don't translate as easily as you
hope.
[If you're a EE or maybe chemist or physicist with no programming skills -
if you can find such anymore - LabView can be a good alternative.]

There is no reason, however, not to do both a graphical language and a more
traditional text based language, choosing, at the moment, whichever is
appropriate for her current pet project.

On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 8:34 AM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Dec 24, 2015 12:47, "Paul Beaudet" <inof8or at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Pointing to the training wheel equivalent here alarms me we may be
> overlooking the key objective, which is inspiration for a young person.
>
> Conversely, if you give a ten-speed racing bike to someone who has not yet
> learned to crawl, that will be pretty discouraging.  I remember seeing such
> a bike as a very young kid, and not having a clue what all those levers
> did.  Having to learn all that while also learning to get my legs to drive
> the pedals while also learning how to balance would have been much more
> difficult for me.  I'm glad I started with my single-speed coaster-braked
> bike.
>
> > Codeacademy and Khan start and such a basic level it's hard to see the
> forest through the trees.  Here me right, I think they are great tools, I
> just personally found them frustrating because of the great amount of time
> taken mucking through the weeds or things that were already understood.
>
> Things like proper syntax, rules of scoping, function definitions, and so
> on can be weeds for some.
>
> The advantage of things like LOGO, Scratch, and the like, is they get
> people thinking about decomposing a problem into algorithms, variables,
> debugging, and so on, without having to know what any of those things are.
> The visual metaphors tap into basic skills we learn playing with blocks as
> toddlers.  For some people, that can be a huge enabler.
>
> There's no one solution that's right for everyone.
>
> -- Ben
>
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