Purpose:
- Teach the fundamentals of computer programming to kids in a fun way.
- Provide "layers of complexity" that will allow both the youngest and the older to make programs.
Thoughts:
- There have been some initial movements in a positive direction here, but I've yet to find something really satisfactory. The Lego Mindstorms kit provides a programming environment. Unfortunately, its really limited what one can do and the graphical aspects take some getting used to. I would love for that environment to take the graphical abstractions off the page and allow kids to program with actual function calls and logical structures.
- There are some sites (here's one) that purport to have links to other software packages, but I can't really find much of interest.
- Web programming would be, I think, very interesting to my kids. If they could do something there, they'd be able to share it with their friends. It could be linked to databases. Eventually, they could be writing PHP and SQL? I don't know how old somebody needs to be to learn those things, but I think it would be possible for my 13 year old daughter to do it.
- If the above statement is true, these kids are going to need some real logic training - probably more than just their intuition.
- If you have ideas or software that you like that does this, please let me know. Thanks!
