Lambda the Ultimate

Dijkstra would have considered me warped too, I learned BASIC on TRS-80 CoCo II. In response to the age question, what age is too young? I myself learned when I was 8 and have programmed pretty continously ever since(not meant as a brag, I did nothing useful with it until I was around 16, nothing worth talking about until I was 18-19).

I will second the notion that games seem to be the universal drawing factor for kids, although, I got a huge kick of interest from demos as well(watching Second Reality for the first time back in 1995 still rates as one of my all-time life-changing experiences with a computer, when I realized something like that was possible on a computer there was no turning back). In case anyone else is a closet demo junkie, the Demo DVD is a worthwhile investment if you can no longer run some oldies-but-goodies. Now that I'm totally offtopic, I suppose I should really stop talking now :).

Lego mindstorms are 680x inside, iirc. There are lisps or schemes for it. The first one I found was XS Lisp (a project presented at ILC) http://www.yuasa.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yuasa/xs/. Dubé has implemented a r4rs (?) for PIC, a much less pwoerful platform, so I have no doubt that at least an R$RS implementation is possible for RCX. Interacting with the real world is even cooler than making games, and, while kids tend to get bored of text-based games after a while, the IO capabilities of a robot will always beat that of a screen and keyboard/mouse :)

You might also want to look at the Transterpreter, a transputer virtual machine for Mindstorms. Writing occam programs is simple, and the concurrency model is powerful and intuitive.

http://www.transterpreter.org/ seems to be the correct url. This is quite nifty, thanks for the pointer.

--Shae Erisson - ScannedInAvian.com

Thanks for catching that! It's amazing how one little misplaced quote can completely screw you up :(

I'm about to start teaching Scratch from MIT at my local school and I've offered the course to kids 9 and up.

I've put down the notes for my first few modules on http://www.teachkidstoprogram.com/ if anyone has any comments or ideas!

I concur with DrScheme, and would strongly recommend the How to Design Programs book (http://www.htdp.org/) as the supporting material

... but for almost identical reasons, I recommended CTM and Oz, assuming that the kids are teenagers!

I have to confess to neither having read CTM (Ehud will probably revoke my editorship...) nor having used Oz, but if I were to advance pros and cons between Prolog & Oz, I guess they would go something like:

1. +PL: Tighter relationship to predicate calculus;

2. +Oz: Natural expression of many fundamental POPL ideas;
3. +PL: Better understood technology;
4. -PL: Too much of that tech is ugly hackery;
5. +Oz: Momentum, not a dying language.

Is the above about right?

If I were teaching programming I would want a good tutorial and reference by my elbow. For example, Ruby has the "Pickaxe" book of Hunt and Thomas. As far as I know there is no contender for Oz. CTM is a great book for the Big Ideas but of course is not intended as a textbook on Oz.

... but in this context, I looked at an LtU-meister being the source of instruction...

I seem to recall (early 80s?) reading about six year olds learning very basic programming with LOGO.

I don't know what else Box is doing (he may already be teaching them 10 languages), but I'd much rather first teach/have them learn a 2nd or third human language than programming.

Although I suppose that without an immersive program they'll never pick up the right morphemes.

I like the concept of teaching kids to create programs on paper tape -- it's very interactive and a nice link to the history of computing, too.

For more robotics, Parallax have various educational-oriented robots, include walkers, crawlers, and wheeled models. One of their models, the Boe Bot, is supposed to be available at Radio Shack stores, and has an associated tutorial, Robotics with the Boe Bot (4.4MB PDF). I believe the robots are mostly based on the BASIC Stamp chip, a PIC chip that run a BASIC interpreter, so if you're looking for fancier languages, these may not be the best choice.

They also have a series of instructional kits/experiments called Stamps in Class.

A friend of mine got one of these kits for his daughter to present at her school science fair, and they were both very happy with how it turned out.

Why can't I have a blank comment? :-)

Fixed, thanks.

Ehud wrote: I am glad Don's runner ups are Logo and Scheme.

I'm less happy. Logo has the advantage of being well-throught through pedagogically, but as a language I don't find it particularly enlightened. And he didn't look at any logic programming or highly declarative languages, which I think might have been just what the doctor ordered.

It's a shame there isn't a "Little Schemer" or "How to Design Programs" for Oz; I really do think that would be an amazing thing. I'm firmly with those who maintain that in the modern era, teaching programming without treating at least concurrency, and ideally distribution, from the outset only causes unnecessary pain later. Unfortunately, Oz is really the only language I can think of that's suitable for teaching both concurrent and distributed programming in an introductory setting. Well, perhaps Erlang, but then you couldn't start talking about logic programming, or object-oriented programming, in the same context.

So short of that, I'm afraid that DrScheme still wins: you have the rich basis of Scheme, the great environment and supporting tools and documentaiton, and at least an implementation with threads and TCP/IP support. It's possible to not fall into the trap of launching right into shared-state concurrency with the tools, just probably harder than it would be with Oz.

Programming with shapes and colors still fascinates me. I'd like to try teaching kids to program with something like Wouter Van Oortmerssen's Sauerkraut.



Or maybe Wouter's language Aardappel for older students.

(The picture below is the original Boerenkool interface that was later integrated into Aardappel for the UI.)

Most kids I know would start clicking and dragging immediately upon seeing the first interface above. You have any kids handy? Want to ask them what they think about these pictures?


--Shae Erisson - ScannedInAvian.com

And he didn't look at any logic programming or highly declarative languages, which I think might have been just what the doctor ordered.

I guess we should have started out by asking why teach kids to program in the first place? What do you want to achieve?

Can you be more specific about highly declarative languages? Which do you have in mind?

I missed Ehud's request at the time, but stumbled upon it through googledipidity.

Given Don wanted his kids to aquire a sound intuition on things like logic, predicates, sets, and functions, including how they manifest in computers, I don't find either scheme or logo to be remarkably compelling (scheme does have a respectable history of connections with logic etc., but many people learn scheme without acquiring much in the way of good intuitions here).

The kind of highly declarative language I was thinking of I guess would have been along the lines of APL, Haskell or Mathematica.

Ouch! Do you really think that you can teach normal kids APL as a programming language? I think you could do that only if you prtended it is a puzzle, not a programming language... Kids love ciphers (at least some of them do!)

More seriously, I think that APL is not the best way to teach about functions and even logic. Haskell can be a good idea. I am not sure why you dismiss Scheme. Maybe the logic angle is a bit weak, but you learn quite a lot about functions...

I am sure Wadler thought about Haskell first. Don't you?

APL isn't the easiest case to make, but I think one could put together an attractive tutorial that teaches these logic/set-theoretic ideas side by side with geometric ideas. Doubt it's been done at an accessible enough level though, so I guess it's moot.

It was Don Box's request originally: did he get in touch with Wadler?

I don't know.

The closest thing I can think of (regarding APL, sets and geometry) is the J dictionary. But it is not for kids. And too deep even for many adults...

I haven't seen this book. From the google previes it sure looks nice.