Were you coding when you were a kid? Well, if you’re lucky enough you’d answer Yes, but were there easy programming languages that can be understood by a child mind? Humm, BASIC? Yes, this latter was a good choice back in time to learn how to code simple programs, but with the evolution of technologies today, it would be great to learn a new programming language that offers facilities to the new minds in order to understand the principles of coding with some new trends.
In fact, there are many open source programming languages that aim at teaching younger minds how to create programming projects in a funny and amusing way. Here are some of them with a description from their official website:
Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.
Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.
Scratch is available free of charge: go to Download.
Currently available for Mac OSX and Windows (see system requirements)Scratch’s home page: http://scratch.mit.edu/
Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.
Alice’s home page: http://www.alice.org/
Shoes is a tiny graphics toolkit, designed for beginners. But make no mistake: this is real programming. You can make real, colorful apps in Shoes.
Well, what is a colorful app?Correct me if I’m wrong, but a colorful app is one which lets you freely paint with colors! And Shoes does that. You can paint colorful shapes and images wherever you like. The entire app is a canvas.
Shoes’s home page: http://shoooes.net/
Come on kids, you’re so lucky to have such friendly programming languages, start coding ! Now .
September 9, 2009 at 6:56 pm |
yes , that’s true …good ideas to make a digital community …from the childhood ,… but what about our children , often they should learn “English” language after that programming language …. some times it’s difficult for child who is loving games , games and games …. he hasn’t the time lol ..
there some attempts in our arabic community , …like sakher “for me not good ” , … other lang which is difficult seems C but the strange that who develop this langage begin from the “prog lang to children” you take a look to this http://www.jeemlang.com/
some other project which are individual project like : programming without coding which developed by Eng Mahmoud Faied … http://itwadi.com/node/294
well , what I ‘d like to say is that in our community as algerians or arabics …. is hard to apply like this idea ..not impossible
thankx friend you have good blog, amazing ideas …. continue
September 9, 2009 at 9:53 pm |
Thanks for your informative comment, in fact, the biggest challenge in teaching programming languages for kids, is the English language, as you said there are some efforts of some arabic IT companies like “sakher”, actually I was using their software when I was a kid, it was called “test your knowledge”, it’s a sort of a cultural game, I found it pretty informative. English for kids is the task of the parents more than any software. So the parents should try to give their children a way to learn a basic English so they can start learning some programming languages for kids.
September 10, 2009 at 12:38 am |
yes , … that’s all right , … but if we can make him under stand the english , it’s hard to make him search , googled ,…make his personnel method of research couz this it s comming after learning many books , … asking , read blogs , writing in forums …. I’m not talking about the case where we find the parents not programmers , … doctor,nurse,farmer, … this is possible ..and it’s impossible to find all his answers at his parents , ….
tragedy case , to lose active child need more info … his prob is an arabic ,
good luck man
September 10, 2009 at 1:31 am |
friend , how can I contact you … no mail , … no contact form