Computing and kids
Rakesh
Josh Berry
am very interested in any lessons learned, though. I can say that I
personally think the tablets are a very promising thing for kids.
Computers are just too easily broken, it seems. :)
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Fabrizio Giudici
> I don't have any real advice to offer as my children are all < 2. I
> am very interested in any lessons learned, though. I can say that I
> personally think the tablets are a very promising thing for kids.
> Computers are just too easily broken, it seems. :)
Are you saying that tablets are designed for surviving a drop on the
floor, or being sit on and such? :-)
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Josh Berry
<Fabrizio...@tidalwave.it> wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:16:10 +0200, Josh Berry <tae...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't have any real advice to offer as my children are all < 2. I
>> am very interested in any lessons learned, though. I can say that I
>> personally think the tablets are a very promising thing for kids.
>> Computers are just too easily broken, it seems. :)
>
> Are you saying that tablets are designed for surviving a drop on the floor,
> or being sit on and such? :-)
Actually, it is more just that they don't have keys to break.
Keyboards are disastrous in the hands of a toddler. Buttons don't
just scream to be pressed, as most UI folks believe, they are there to
be interacted with. For my toddlers, that means prying as much as
pushing.
Shaine Ismail
so we are just writing a simple tick tack toe game ( similar to the one i wrote when i started Uni), I am trying to keep close to what interests him ( mainly games )
but you could try scratch --> http://scratch.mit.edu/
Regards
Shaine
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Joe Sondow
before it drifts into the archives. However, I suggest you look at
Dave's web site and podcast about teaching kids to program. He was
using Alice but he seems to prefer Kojo now.
http://young-programmers.blogspot.com/
http://davebsoft.com/
opinali
I don't have any real advice to offer as my children are all < 2. I
am very interested in any lessons learned, though. I can say that I
personally think the tablets are a very promising thing for kids.
Computers are just too easily broken, it seems. :)
First lesson for you, then :-) A few months ago, my then-almost-2yo daughter got my laptop when I was distracted for only a few minutes, and she... ripped off most keys from the keyboard. I could not reinsert all the keys because some of the tiny key hinges were broken, so I had to order a new keyboard.
I have a 5yo boy too. I let him play in my laptop, but only a couple hours in the weekend. He uses Google Chrome, because the chrome store is really easy, he learned to use it to discover games; and also because it's a "safe" source of games too (many popular sites that have hundreds of flash games contain adult games or links to ugly stuff, so got to take care, or use some blocking software). But I also bought him a toy laptop that has only "edutainment" games. Obviously he doesn't like that as much as my laptop, the kid already has a taste for beefier hardware :) [and also the toy doesn't have games that allow him to electrocute zombies...], but he can use it more freely. Also the toy laptop is sturdier, and if he ever breaks it, it's just $20. (But very likely, has more processing power than my first 8-bit machine in the late 80's...)
A+
Osvaldo
ricky.c...@gmail.com
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Marco Faustinelli
I've had reasonably good responses putting at disposal of my kids the
MicroWorlds products (JR and advanced, especially the first one), but
they were 6 and 9. MicroWorlds JR is completely visual and allows to
create small animated cartoons with sound effects; it is a good
training ground on causes & effects, logical conditions and such.
Possibly you could operate it and facilitate, but I never tried that.
Once grown up, there is also free software from Carnegie Mellon,
produced by the group of late Randy Pausch (Alice and especially
Storytelling Alice).
Kids can be very enjoyable and rewarding in these aspects :-)
Have a good day,
Marco
JamesJ
some advice from a golfer. He started with the objective to make it
fun. He said to start with some playing for short periods on the
lawn, or going to hit some balls on the driving range for a short
time, with minimal criticizing and afterwards took his kids for
ice-cream or some treat.
The most important thing is to provide opportunities, but don't let
yourself or you kid get upset or stressed, ever.
I have kids from 15 down to 8. I think that for serious programming,
10 to 13 is still pretty early. They don't have much patience and
expect to be able to whip out some polished game in an afternoon that
would really take 20 man years.
The science fair was a good chance to have some incentive to work on
programming and my oldest enjoyed that.
I think whatever system you choose, you need to balance what it is
teaching, how much you have to do to see results, how much fun it is
to encourage continuing work.
I have been blown away with the realization of how much you really
have to understand to be a decent programmer. It is a huge
curriculum. Take it in small chunks.
At 4, I think the best idea is to just have fun with him. Play some
puzzle games together and lots of hands on open ended building like
leggos. (Save the mindstorms for later, or just get it for your
self.)
opinali
Though your 8-bit machine probably had a programming language interpreter you could learn to program with.
True, alas it was basically the _only_ thing the machine offered, unless I'd have the patience to wait 5 minutes to load a game from cassette tape :)
It's a bit early to worry about this, my kid just started Kindergarten, learning to read and write... but yeah, I already ponder how to introduce a children to programming in a few years.
A+
Osvaldo
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Sender: java...@googlegroups.comDate: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:40:25 -0700 (PDT)
To: <jav...@googlegroups.com>
Ricky Clarkson
Alexey Zinger
Subject: Re: [The Java Posse] Computing and kids
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Robert Casto
Growing up I would walk 5 miles to use the library Apple II+ and Apple IIe computers they had. I was just drawn to what these things could do and the control you could have. I took a formal class in high school but it was a joke. I never considered it a vocation though.
In college I declared I was going to study chemical engineering. After a couple run ins with some acid and a whole lot of "dishes" to clean, I took a step back to look at my options. My wife mentioned that I could get a degree in hardware or software and after looking at all the math you needed to do electrical engineering, I decided on a BS is Computer Science.
Not the best way to go about it for sure, but I never thought of it as a job. Even now, I am amazed at what you can get computers to do and its great that most people don't have a clue how to get them to do anything. Lots of job security for the likes of us.
One of my daughters likes the Lego Mindstorms. She got it to do stuff for a contest in the club she is with. Only after all of that did I tell her that she was programming. She realized that was what she was doing and thought it was very cool. Before hand, she would have vehemently avoided doing anything remotely related to what her dad did for a living.
So keep it light, informal, fun, exploratory, and just challenging enough to keep them engaged. She now loves telling the devices what to do and when she outgrows Lego Mindstorms, I'll look around for the next thing up. She is an inventor and tinkerer at heart and just loves learning how things work. Next week, we are fixing our projection tv because the convergence chips went out. I think she is going to enjoy that a whole lot more than I will.
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Jon Kiparsky
Also handy is Martin Gardner's "Aha!". Again, it's a little advanced, but I don't think that's a big problem. If they don't understand all of it, or even most of it, it'll pique an interest in this sort of problem.
And I'll second the idea of adding Lewis Carroll to the bedtime reading - not just for the kid, either, but for the parent as well.
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Ricky Clarkson
I'm not a parent either, but I suspect that four might be a bit early for sticking the kid into a machine
opinali
I'm not a parent either, but I suspect that four might be a bit early for sticking the kid into a machineI started programming at age 5 on a Spectrum 48K and no harm came of it besides the usual BASIC braindamage (no multiline functions on a 48K, only goto, gosub and return - if I'm wrong someone please pop back to '86 and tell me). Though those who know me best might disagree.
Well I disagree a bit on the "brain damage" part :) those old BASICs, with nonexistent structural features, were actually very close to the machine's computation model. GOTO and GOSUB are similar to Assembly language's jumps and calls; even FOR was close to machine code looping with instructions like DJNZ (decrement-and-jump-if-zero). The limited set of data types were a thin layer over machine types - no fancy structs, enums, classes or lists; only arrays and strings, both of these just sugar over dense memory blocks and indexed access, again the single "structured type" directly supported by the hardware with complex addressing instructions or index registers. Most so-called higher-level BASIC commands, e.g. for graphics, should actually be considered built-in libraries and not part of the language. The core language itself was just simple branching, variables with simple types and destructive assignment (no functional bullshit :), basic arithmetic, and "native interface" (calls to Assembly code; PEEK/POKE to memory).
When I moved to Z80, I was already comfortable with most important things: subroutines using call/return and an invocation stack; "wild branching" (streams of code with multiple entry points, multiple returns, spaghetti branching inside and across algorihms); indexing, data blocks; disciplines like arithmetic optimization (x+x instead of x*2 etc.), boolean logic. Then, like many other self-taught programmers of the time, I learned or independently "invented" techniques like self-modifying code and stack patching; spent 80% of my time manually doing low-level optimizations such as optimal register allocation, instruction selection, propagation, unrolling etc., before I had the faintest education on language theory or compilers or anything... the good thing is that after this start, every language you learn is just syntax sugar ;-) yeah, sometimes the sugar enabled radically new paradigms that your neurons will sweat to fully understand, but I don't think the indoctrination to a lower-level programming model was ever a factor to make it harder.
OTOH, a unstructured language that pretends to be a high-level language, such as old VB, *is* something I consider a problem, in the Dijkstra category of GOTO-is-evil-burns-brains-forever. This doesn't put you neither in the bottom-up road (like starting with Assembly or a low-level Basic), nor in the top-down road (starting with Scheme or other decent, respected high-level languages, often used in classic introductory programming at CS courses).
A+
Osvaldo
Kevin Wright
Cédric Beust ♔
On Saturday, October 1, 2011 5:07:13 PM UTC-4, Ricky Clarkson wrote:I'm not a parent either, but I suspect that four might be a bit early for sticking the kid into a machineI started programming at age 5 on a Spectrum 48K and no harm came of it besides the usual BASIC braindamage (no multiline functions on a 48K, only goto, gosub and return - if I'm wrong someone please pop back to '86 and tell me). Though those who know me best might disagree.
Well I disagree a bit on the "brain damage" part :)
Jon Kiparsky
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Russel Winder
[ . . . ]
>
> Yeah, it's nonsense. Probably close to 100% of the great developers
> that I know started with BASIC. I bet most people on this list over
> the age of thirty did as well. I think we all turned out okay.
Some of us started programming using real programming languages.
FORTRAN. COBOL. None of this nambi-pambi BASIC rubbish :-)
More seriously: It's not about the language, it's about the problem,
the solution, and most importantly, the motivation. My motivation was
solving maths and physics problems at school, hence FORTRAN. Most
people's motivation is more likely games of one sort or another.
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Matthew Farwell
Russel Winder
> Plenty of us also started young without being exposed to imperative
> code and the evil goto, via LOGO and turtle graphics. For anyone who
> wasn't aware, it's actually a fully featured FP language that derives
> from Lisp. Although not too many people (especially in that age range)
> delved deeply enough into the language that they'd really cover many
> aspects of FP.
Since when does turtle graphics qualify as functional programming? The
whole point of turtle graphics is that it imperatively moves a turtle
which is a stateful system. OK, it can be implemented with a functional
language if you want, but Lisp hardly qualifies as a pure functional
language given it has modifiable state.
> I guess the modern equivalent would be Kojo, although nobody - to my
> knowledge - has yet set it up to drive a real, physical turtle. It's
> a shame really, as a touchable turtle was one of LOGO's best features
> for really getting kids into this stuff.
For introductory teaching using Python, Sarah, James and myself went for
turtle graphics. It is a fun way of introducing the concept of
algorithms. It works especially well with economists, graphics
designers, post-production folk, artists. Why are they learning
programming? To write plugins for the engines they have to use as part
of economics, graphics design, post-production, art, etc.
This has been echoed by the "Karel the robot" books.
The point here is that given some motivation to learn programming,
turtle graphics is a trivially simple system that can be understood
easily and yet leads to huge complexity in stages that allow learning.
Graham Roberts at UCL uses what is effectively turtle graphics on Groovy
to teach first year CS students introductory programming. Works very
well. This can diverge into parametric geometry or maze crawling.
The secret is to ensure appropriate levels of humour, levity and fun.
Russel Winder
> Fortran? COBOL? You were lucky! When I started programming, I had to
> punch cards using me own tongue, and if you missed an ole, your father
> used to beat you until you were dead, to get a slot on machine, we
> used to have to get up half an hour before we went to bed, etc. etc.
<yorkshire-men-sketch-accent>
Luxury.
</yorkshire-men-sketch-accent>
And yes we were using punch cards, but with a proper machine rather than
the manual ones.
Another skill that has been lost is editing large rolls of paper tape --
far harder than editing punch card decks.
BTW Fortran is a not-bad language, unlike FORTRAN.
Bruce Chapman
paper clips to punch the Fortran programs.
OTOH You guys had it easy with access to a machine. Once punched, our
cards were put in the post, and send 200km to the nearest university,
where they sat in the absolute lowest priority queue, and eventually
they ran the deck and mailed it back to our school with the lineflow
output - the longest turnaround was over 6 weeks. Unsurprisingly desk
checking and code reviews were the first professional skills we taught
ourselves. Despite these hardships I still fell in love with the
adventure of pitting my mind against the machine and bending it to my will.
Bruce
Russel Winder
> You guys had it tough, we were allowed to use partially straightened
> paper clips to punch the Fortran programs.
:-)
> OTOH You guys had it easy with access to a machine. Once punched, our
> cards were put in the post, and send 200km to the nearest university,
> where they sat in the absolute lowest priority queue, and eventually
> they ran the deck and mailed it back to our school with the lineflow
> output - the longest turnaround was over 6 weeks. Unsurprisingly desk
> checking and code reviews were the first professional skills we taught
> ourselves. Despite these hardships I still fell in love with the
> adventure of pitting my mind against the machine and bending it to my will.
Locally we were starting a rebuild of a third hand Elliott 503. For real
computing were were sending card decks off to Imperial College's IBM
7094. So not 200km, but most of the rest sounds familiar. Except the
turnaround was supposed to be 1 week.
Methinks we are getting a long way from Java and the Posse...
vjosullivan
take them to the processing room and hand the deck in through the
window, collect them back four hours later wrapped in a printout,
debug, repeat...
On Oct 3, 9:54 am, Russel Winder <rus...@russel.org.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-10-03 at 10:42 +0200, Matthew Farwell wrote:
> > Fortran? COBOL? You were lucky! When I started programming, I had to
> > punch cards using me own tongue, and if you missed an ole, your father
> > used to beat you until you were dead, to get a slot on machine, we
> > used to have to get up half an hour before we went to bed, etc. etc.
>
> <yorkshire-men-sketch-accent>
> Luxury.
> </yorkshire-men-sketch-accent>
>
> And yes we were using punch cards, but with a proper machine rather than
> the manual ones.
>
> Another skill that has been lost is editing large rolls of paper tape --
> far harder than editing punch card decks.
>
> BTW Fortran is a not-bad language, unlike FORTRAN.
>
> --
> Russel.
> =============================================================================
> London SW11 1EN, UK w:www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder
>
> < 1KViewDownload
Eric Jablow
On Oct 3, 4:54 am, Russel Winder <rus...@russel.org.uk> wrote:
> And yes we were using punch cards, but with a proper machine rather than
> the manual ones.
>
> Another skill that has been lost is editing large rolls of paper tape --
> far harder than editing punch card decks.
>
department's old PDP-8. So there!
Respectfully,
Eric Jablow