Programming for Kids 10-15 years?

Question

Which software / language / platform / graphics / animation tool would be best for teaching programming to kids of 10-15 years? It would be best if the the tool is free for usage.

Answer 1

Take a look at Alice. It's designed to teach programming concepts to non-programmers.

http://www.alice.org/index.php



(This is the Alice developed at Carnegie Mellon University. There's another Alice language from Saarland University that's a variant of the ML functional programming language.)



The CMU Alice is designed to be friendly. Computational steps are introduced as actions performed visibly by 3-D models. I haven't used it (yet?) but a video demo looked very nice, starts very simply with no "syntax" to learn and yet allows very complex ideas to be developed when the student is ready.

Answer 2

I'm not too familiar with teaching tools used for programming, since I learned more through text books and tutorials. However I am familiar with a learning tool that has come into its own for teaching Java starting at a pretty high level called BlueJ.



BlueJ is a good tool for teaching high level Java programming without having to jump into the depths of how and why things work right away. Building entities and relationships between those entities is done mostly through diagramming, so a majority of the coding is hidden at the beginning.



You could also look into JavaScript, since there is no compiling needed for coding. The only problem with this is that learning it is mostly looking at raw code for the very start.



Truth be told, I don't know how effective these would be with 10-12 year old kids.

Answer 3

I found an Apple ][ emulator and picked up an old Apple BASIC book for my kids when they asked about learning computer programming. trying to start them off about the same as I got my start back in the 80s when computers actually had BASIC programming capabilities.



I think it's difficult and frustrating for someone to try to dive into java or C++ without an understanding of the basics that BASIC can teach (if taught well).

Answer 4

Well the first thing is they have to learn the programming concept.

All program languages use the same concept, just in different ways.

They need to learn how programming works in general, then I'd start them out in basic html.