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Thursday, September 14, 2006 12:00 AM

Why Johnny can't code

BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.
By David Brin

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  • Friday, September 15, 2006 06:49 AM

    Modern alternatives to Basic

    I too learned basic in school in the 70's.

    For a current intro into the world of programming I would give a kid either "LOGO" for kids up to 10 (I think my dog could learn LOGO) and Flash or Runtime Revolution (hypercard on steroids) for older kids.

    All of these tools will illustrate programming concepts as well as giving a lot of exciting results for relatively little effort. Flash is especially rewarding, because of its easy handling of all kinds of media and strong math abilities. You can actually make some decent games with it pretty easily. It also has a huge user community with millions of tutorials and examples.

    As I recall, Basic was pretty boring compared to hypercard, as it took dozens of lines of code to do even a simple graphic, and keeping track of those paper tapes was a drag.

    —Michael Crumpton

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