|  Author | Topic: Do Kids Still Program? (Read 1,909 times) |
Golan Klinger
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|  | Do Kids Still Program?
« Thread Started on Apr 29, 2006, 1:43am » | |
There's an interesting story at Slashdot which asks, "Do Kids Still Program?" (see http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/28/2236239 and I thought it might be interesting to have a discussion here about the subject. I'm also curious how many of you all program, when you started and in what languages and on what platform?
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dilbert
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #1 on Apr 29, 2006, 1:00pm » | |
Nah. Too much Pain. just give'm a CDROM.
Dilbert 
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Robin Harbron
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #2 on Apr 29, 2006, 8:57pm » | |
I first started programming when I was around 9 years old on the PETs at school (around 1981 or so) in BASIC. I then continued with BASIC on the first two computers I owned, a Timex/Sinclair 1000 in 1982 and a C-64 in 1983. By around 1986 I was playing around with ML, then Pascal and C around 1990ish.
FWIW, some kids are learning to program nowadays: http://psw.ca/robin/?p=157 
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thurstan
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #3 on May 2, 2006, 3:30am » | |
For me it was BASIC on my Amstrad, just learning through type-ins and messing around nothing serious. then I went to university and had to learn some FORTRAN 77. I then took a course in C++ and played around with Visual Basic. At the moment I am learning Turbo Pascal and Dark Basic for game programming.
Really a mixed bag as I quickly got bored of learning! But programming games has perked my interest now!
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Golan Klinger
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #4 on May 2, 2006, 4:19pm » | |
Quote:
I was hoping you would post about your computer classes. I think it's great that you're teaching kids to program and doing it on the 64 is a great idea. Computers are so impersonal these days. There is layer after layer of operating system and applications between the user and the machine. The beauty of the 64, and of most 8 bit computers, was that you could sit down, write a few lines of code and get instant results which is exactly what's needed when teaching kids.
You're doing a very good thing, Robin.
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dilbert
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #5 on May 5, 2006, 10:39am » | |
Quote:
Quote:
I was hoping you would post about your computer classes. I think it's great that you're teaching kids to program and doing it on the 64 is a great idea. Computers are so impersonal these days. There is layer after layer of operating system and applications between the user and the machine. The beauty of the 64, and of most 8 bit computers, was that you could sit down, write a few lines of code and get instant results which is exactly what's needed when teaching kids.
You're doing a very good thing, Robin. |
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Robin,
Quote:Nah. Too much Pain. just give'm a CDROM.
Dilbert |
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Please except my apology- You are doing a very good thing.
Everyone that reads this thread should goto your Blog. (see above.)
Dilbert 
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dilbert
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #6 on May 5, 2006, 11:17am » | |
Quote:
Quote:
I was hoping you would post about your computer classes. I think it's great that you're teaching kids to program and doing it on the 64 is a great idea. Computers are so impersonal these days. There is layer after layer of operating system and applications between the user and the machine. The beauty of the 64, and of most 8 bit computers, was that you could sit down, write a few lines of code and get instant results which is exactly what's needed when teaching kids.
You're doing a very good thing, Robin. |
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Quote:| There is layer after layer of operating system and applications between the user and the machine. The beauty of the 64, and of most 8 bit computers, was that you could sit down, write a few lines of code and get instant results which is exactly what's needed when teaching kids. |
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Golan,
You've nailed it. This is my take on the subject too.
Rant:> Although we liked the 8 bit world, when the powers-to-be went to 16 bits, ( I blame Intel & IBM mostly.), we got the --(messed up?) segmented memory map, protected & real modes and THEN Microsoft threw in DLLs and
RESOURCES that couldn't be just simply compiled....(read My$$), what I had learned went down the drain quickly. I'm only now get back on top of the computer and programing, as I think are others. >>see PICAXE here.
Dilbert
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mattwilson247
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #7 on May 6, 2006, 2:29am » | |
I started with BASIC on the Apple IIe in 6th grade in a computer class. I remember entering 3 pages of code into the Apple from the back of a BYTE magazine issue. It played the Star Spangled Banner and showed fireworks! Awesome!
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fuzz64
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #8 on May 6, 2006, 1:26pm » | |
This "kid" is still learning to program..
I started in BASIC in 1996 I believe.. would have been 13 at the time. Then Macbeth (see his post above and how he is teaching other youngsters!) taught me most of what I know about c64 assembly language
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MadModder
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #9 on May 6, 2006, 4:28pm » | |
I started with basic on a C64 around 1986-87.
Soon I got a Simons Basic cartridge, but after a while I thought it was slow. Didn't work with austrospeed either, ofcourse.
Later I found something I don't remember the name of, but it greatly eased the programming. Autonumbering rows for example, and renumbering which kept track of goto's and gosub's also! Woohoo!
Then in school we had those crappy COMPIS-computers, and comal. At which I got quite good. At least better than my teacher  All forgotten now.
Later on I bought an Amiga500+, and a friend gave me a copy of HiSoft Basic. I made thousands of programs. I began using Amos Basic, and used it for several years. I have a few full boxes of disks with code...
Learned Pascal in school. Did teachers examples in notime, got bored, started coding my own stuff, teacher did not like that...  Have forgotten all about pascal now.
Then I got a PC. Started using Quick Basic 4.5. Somewhat boring, but made a few useful programs. Eventually Visual Basic came on to me. Much easier to do useful GUIs.
Later on I began understanding HTML. And even later PHP. PHP is very useful IMO.
The other day I came across fortran (strange language) when searching for a special algorithm. I translated it to PHP, hehe.
I hate the usual way of beeing taught something...
I like the command reference appendix. Everything nicely lined up in tables with very short explanations. That is how I learned PHP.
But basic is still my favourite programming language, 20 years after my first contact with C64.
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Golan Klinger
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #10 on May 8, 2006, 6:34pm » | |
I've been thinking a lot about children and programming and how they're not automatically exposed to programming the way we (the children of the 80's) were. I was looking at the current state of Logo and Squeak (http://www.squeak.org/ and more specifically, http://www.squeakland.org/) when I came across the Kid's Programming Language (http://www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com/). The website gives a far better description of what KPL is than I ever could so I encourage you to take a look. The only downside is that it requires the .NET framework making it, for the time being, a Windows-only proposition.
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thurstan
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #11 on May 9, 2006, 4:57am » | |
Yes us kids at school in the 80's in the UK were pretty much all shown LOGO and how to do simple things with it, including Turtle Graphics.
These days it seems whilst they get exposure to PC's and Windows applications, they dont get shown any kind of programming or underlying technology.
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fuzz64
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #12 on May 18, 2006, 12:19am » | |
A lot of highschools in Ontario now have hardware and programming courses for grade 9/10 students... still not the same as teaching an 8 year old, but it's a step closer.
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retrobits
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #13 on May 18, 2006, 10:59am » | |
My first programs were in Fortran with "mark-sense" cards (punch cards, but you pencil in the codes). But my first "real" programming was on an Apple II in Integer BASIC.
I don't know if kids still learn programming in middle or high school. But I'm intending to teach my kids, and much of it will probably be on a retro system. My son's first BASIC programming was on my TRS-80 MC-10. He saw me playing with it and liked it (that's a computer? It's so small!). So, I taught him some BASIC. He's only 8, but he knows about single algebraic variables (my little math guy), so showing him how to do a simple loop, some sound and graphics was pretty easy. He took right to it, I couldn't get him off the machine. It was amazing. He would not have taken to a modern machine/language like that, too much overhead.
- Earl
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tetsujin
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| | Re: Do Kids Still Program?
« Reply #14 on May 18, 2006, 1:38pm » | |
Quote:
Quote:
I was hoping you would post about your computer classes. I think it's great that you're teaching kids to program and doing it on the 64 is a great idea. Computers are so impersonal these days. There is layer after layer of operating system and applications between the user and the machine. The beauty of the 64, and of most 8 bit computers, was that you could sit down, write a few lines of code and get instant results which is exactly what's needed when teaching kids.
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I only just recently got a real C64 again, and I have to say that after looking at the machine and its schematics after all this time one of the things that really amazes me is that the hardware is incredibly accessible, too. The system's address and data buses are built on a handful of circuit traces and a bunch of parts you could buy at a well-stocked electronics store. (For instance, look at what's involved in the Stereo SID board at the IDE64 page - the two SID chips are made to share the D400-D7FF I/O range by adding a simple binary decoder IC to handle the addressing)
It's relatively easy to build projects that interface to the bus or the user port, and the overall layout of the machine's hardware is very easy to understand. That just really amazed me when I looked into the machine after all these years.
As for teaching software programming - I think it's an interesting problem. On one end of the spectrum, modern PCs give you the power to run really effective tools to help develop code, and offer a very safe environment that protects you from mistakes. On the other end of the spectrum, small machines like the C64 are simple enough that you can learn most of what you need to be able to do impressive things with them rather quickly. (I really wish I'd taken the time to learn C64 programming in assembly as a kid - I had all the information I needed, right there in the programming manuals... and all the old tutorial books are filled with BASIC programming examples that are all POKE statements - turning that into an ASM program would've been easy...) I think with modern PCs even though you can take advantage of all kinds of libraries to do things and learn to program that way pretty quickly, the problem is that from using those PCs you expect more - so the gap between what you can do and what the PC can do can be discouraging.
Programming computers wasn't something I or my friends really did much, if at all, as kids. We worked with computers, we ran BBSes, we found or downloaded or bought and ran cool software... and I certainly tried programming, as well as systems like Activision's Game Maker program - but we didn't write programs for the most part. Computer classes did include things like LOGO, so I guess there was that...
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