Fw: Re: [seul-edu] programming courses for 6 th grades

[Douglas Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, owner-seul-edu@seul.org wrote:

> From: William Kendrick <nbs@bolt.sonic.net>
> To: seul-edu@seul.org
> Subject: Re: [seul-edu] programming courses for 6 th grades
> 
> Well, well, well.  Look who it is. :)
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 10:56:44AM -0700, zeruch [Joseph Estevao Arruda] wrote:
> > I disagree.  I learned Basic and Logo when I was in 6th grade (and that
> > was in 1986).  Basic was a little bit harder, but much more engaging
> > (part of Basic's advantage was that it really solidified the basic human
> > communication aspect of 'thinking in language').
> 
> 
> Anyway, from my biased standpoint, I learned the basics of BASIC when I
> was about 7 years old.  Most of it was self-taught (typing in stuff from
> books and so forth).
> 
> I learned a little Pascal when I was in high school (about 16 years old)
> and then got hooked on a language for the Atari called Action!.
> It's fairly similar to Pascal and C but had the advantage of having a lot
> of the same keywords and power as Atari BASIC.  (Unlike most BASICs of the
> era, Atari BASIC let you access most of the system's graphics and sound
> capabilities very easily.  No damned POKEs like C=64 BASIC :) )
> 
> I then started learning C in college (about 18 years old) and haven't
> really moved beyond it yet.  It's still my main language, although I've
> been doing a teeny bit of Perl here and there.
> 
> 
> The steps from BASIC -> Pascal/Action! -> C really made things easy.
> (Oh, and I did play with Logo on Apple IIs in elementary school.  We did
> nothing but Turtle Graphics.  In fact, it wasn't until years later that
> I found out Logo could actually do anything useful! :) )
> 
> 
> My vote right now - BASIC.  I'm (surprisingly for me :) ) not very
> familiar with the BASICs available for Unix/Linux.  I've considered
> writing a very simple (and fun) one, though.
> 
> 
> Get kids hooked on programming by letting them do cool whiz-bang things
> on the screen and they'll end up hankering to learn the dull stuff like
> linked-lists down the road. ;)
> 
> 
> -bill!
> 
-- 
Doug Loss           The art of medicine consists of amusing the
dloss@suscom.net    patient while nature cures the disease.
(570) 326-3987             Voltaire