On 2013-04-13 04:56AM, Casey Ransberger wrote: >A few things stuck out. The thing I'd mention is that it seemed to work >(at least superficially) with getting 12 year olds to (begin to) tackle >a programming language which by my own (prejudiced) standards is a >rather difficult choice for *adults* who want to program casually.
My totally amateur two cents: My feeling is that it's not the language which is difficult, but the environment. So tinkering with working Java snippets in a game is probably a lot less intimidating than setting up a Java development environment, learning your way around Eclipse or NetBeans or whatever, and dealing with all the boilerplate needed to build a basic program... My other thought is that getting kids interested in programming doesn't seem to be a difficult thing to do. We have tons of examples, Papert using Logo, Boxer, Scratch, Etoys, the DrRacket folks with Program by Design and Bootstrap and the WeScheme online environment, etc., etc., etc. It seems like any time anyone does even a halfway decent job of providing kids with an environment where they can jump right in and get started writing code that does stuff they can see, with a little support and freedom to explore, the kids take to it like ducks to water. So to me the question is not "how do we get kids interested in programming", but "how do we expose more kids to these environments?" And how do we follow through on this: how do we help them keep using and building those skills? Can we use similar techniques to interest adults? How would I get started on bringing this stuff to my local community? I think it's great that people are doing all this research, but it's frusrating that so much of it is *only* research projects. I feel like we need someone who is deep enough into this stuff to write a volunteer's manual so those of us who aren't so savvy could get a handle on where we might be able to jump in and start helping make some of this stuff part of everyday reality... --Josh _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
