I think that you should consult the child as to whether she: 1. Wants to make the computer do stuff beyond playing games and typing term papers; 2. Is thinking along the lines of joining a FIRST team and contributing to the software; 3. Wants to build her own robot or similar; 4. Wants to better understand what Dad does; 5. Wants a leg up for school, eventually college, computer courses/labs, ability to write tools to do calculations on data from a schools assigned experiment; 6. Some combination. You don't have to get very far down that list before a graphical drag and drop environment is going to start to feel confining. Not that you can't start there. I only have graphical programming with LavView, but I suspect that the skills don't translate as easily as you hope. [If you're a EE or maybe chemist or physicist with no programming skills - if you can find such anymore - LabView can be a good alternative.]
There is no reason, however, not to do both a graphical language and a more traditional text based language, choosing, at the moment, whichever is appropriate for her current pet project. On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 8:34 AM, Ben Scott <dragonh...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Dec 24, 2015 12:47, "Paul Beaudet" <inof...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Pointing to the training wheel equivalent here alarms me we may be > overlooking the key objective, which is inspiration for a young person. > > Conversely, if you give a ten-speed racing bike to someone who has not yet > learned to crawl, that will be pretty discouraging. I remember seeing such > a bike as a very young kid, and not having a clue what all those levers > did. Having to learn all that while also learning to get my legs to drive > the pedals while also learning how to balance would have been much more > difficult for me. I'm glad I started with my single-speed coaster-braked > bike. > > > Codeacademy and Khan start and such a basic level it's hard to see the > forest through the trees. Here me right, I think they are great tools, I > just personally found them frustrating because of the great amount of time > taken mucking through the weeds or things that were already understood. > > Things like proper syntax, rules of scoping, function definitions, and so > on can be weeds for some. > > The advantage of things like LOGO, Scratch, and the like, is they get > people thinking about decomposing a problem into algorithms, variables, > debugging, and so on, without having to know what any of those things are. > The visual metaphors tap into basic skills we learn playing with blocks as > toddlers. For some people, that can be a huge enabler. > > There's no one solution that's right for everyone. > > -- Ben > > _______________________________________________ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ > >
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