> I learned a language called "Logo" first. It was taught by volunteer > instructors at a local community center. I was 7, and the minimum age > was supposed to be 10, but they let me in anyway. I enjoyed it. It came > with a few media functions that made programming more fun since it was > pretty easy to make music or games. Plus it was a little less > sphghettish than BASIC. There are tons of Logo interpreters and books > for kids. I get the feeling it's geared exactly toward teaching > children. Everyone loved the turtle.
I believe you are right and I think Logo used to be taught in schools. Unfortunately, I never learned Logo myself. I do have a copy of the IBM Logo around here somewhere. I think thought Logo might be a bit too simple. Unfortunately, time is something that is a precious commodity and as others have pointed out there are far more useful languages for him to learn (in fact his school has a coding class that teaches some more modern languages - I don't think they even have a BASIC lab like we did back in the 80s/90s.) So as cool as it would be for him to know Logo and other older languages I want to expose him to simple programming and if he shows interest he can move on to more useful stuff. > I learned ASM as a kid (I've never become that great at it, but I get > by). > As a child, I had so few people around who knew anything about > computers, nobody was there to say "that's too hard". I had a book that > came with a timex 1500 my mom got at a garage sale. I just picked it up > and started doing examples. Yeah, kids these days, as a general rule, are not that interested. There is too much instant gratification for them to bother coding 10-20 pages worth of code (like you used to find in magazines) to get a program to run. That being said I would love for him to at least understand the building blocks (binary vs. decimal, notations, etc.) -Ali
