<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div>I think that you should consult the child as to whether she: <br> 1. Wants to make the computer do stuff beyond playing games and typing term papers;<br></div> 2. Is thinking along the lines of joining a FIRST team and contributing to the software;<br></div> 3. Wants to build her own robot or similar;<br></div> 4. Wants to better understand what Dad does;<br></div> 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;<br></div> 6. Some combination.<br></div>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.<br></div>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.<br></div>[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.]<br><br></div>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.<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 8:34 AM, Ben Scott <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dragonhawk@gmail.com" target="_blank">dragonhawk@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class=""><p dir="ltr">On Dec 24, 2015 12:47, "Paul Beaudet" <<a href="mailto:inof8or@gmail.com" target="_blank">inof8or@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> Pointing to the training wheel equivalent here alarms me we may be overlooking the key objective, which is inspiration for a young person. </p>
</span><p dir="ltr">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.<br></p><span class="">
<p dir="ltr">> 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. <br></p>
</span><p dir="ltr">Things like proper syntax, rules of scoping, function definitions, and so on can be weeds for some.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">There's no one solution that's right for everyone.</p><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<p dir="ltr">-- Ben<br>
</p>
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