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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
I started out in BASIC on an Apple II+ with my brother. I quit programming to become a musician (a fun move but made me poor)but I quit to become a programmer. When I was doing basic understood what was happening on a logical level but not much on a bit level. It at least sparked my interest. Fast forward 20 odd years, I have a masters in CIS and am just finishing out a masters in Vocation education. I teach HTML, JavaScript, ASP.NET, C# (oh no!), some diagramming (pseudo code etc), and finally some SQL to high school Jrs and Srs. The problem I come up with is that is that MS has some wonderful teaching resources while I have to consistently work on Java related material. I have a steep learning curve with Eclipse. But with visual studio I have free videos, books they can look up on the internet and other cool things- they are up and going in 2 days. With C# I do console programming to teach them logic and more "classical programming" as I call it. They learn arrays, polymorphism etc to teach coding by hand. I understand why you like basic but these cool IDEs and quick results provided by them is too seductive. Have you looked at MSDN EE? It is great!
If you want to play around with assembly programming, I'd suggest tracking down an embedded processor demo board. I've got an HC11 based board that I picked up a long time ago (I used one when I was in college). http://elmicro.com/en/kit12.php seems to have something appropriate (the HC12 is a newer version of the HC11). Advantages to something like this:
Some company in the UK has it listed for 68 pounds at http://www.equinox-tech.com/products/details.asp?ID=84 .
--Toby Ovod-Everett
The problem, I think, lies in our attitude towards computers today. What is your answer to the question: "What are computers for?"
Are they for programming?
Upon learning that my child's elementary school class had a cart full of computers - one laptop for every child - I excitedly volunteered to teach a class on programming. It could be in any educational language their school preferred: Logo, BASIC, whatever.
Imagine my dismay when the staff explained to me that they did not have any programming language software that could be installed on their computers. These days, computers in the classroom are for "Multimedia Learning". They are used as mere videogames, only marginally better than a VCR.
The world has forgotten the magical activity of programming a computer. Programming is an open-ended, creative activity that can be incredibly rewarding for a kid. Learning a little programming can help crack the mystery of how the modern world works.
I eventually did get around to teaching some programming, on two different occasions. BASIC is not the missing ingredient. The six-year-old bunch took to both Logo and python very well.
(One story here http://davidbau.com/archives/2005/07/27/a_programming_question.html)
Perhaps the problem is that Johnny's teacher does not know how to program. With BASIC having gone out of fashion, training in programming is no longer standard fare for teachers.
Should the educational community choose a new standard-bearer for educational programming? Maybe Johnny's teacher should learn python. Once teachers have a bit of common knowledge, perhaps they will be able to share the magic with the kids.
I absolutely agree with Mr. Brin's stance. The trouble isn't that there aren't tons of programming languages to choose from, many of them free. The problem is that the computer doesn't come with an easy language. And if it did come out of the box (like DOS had QBasic), it really should be an icon on the desktop. Hiding it away would be a bad thing.
Also the programming culture worships complexity. What the professional programmer today considers easy sets a bar way too high for the child or casually interested adult. The result is that the fun is removed from the experience. No fun = no learning.
Schools today think that computer literacy is about using Photoshop, Microsoft Office and Frontpage. That's a low-minded place to be. Teach kids to program. Some of them will latch onto the experience.
BASIC is still around in a way. Most schools have math classes that require a graphing calculator, and some tests requiring a graphing calculator.
The calculator has a BASIC like programming language called, if I remember correctly, True Algebraic Logic for Casio. Against teacher advice, my sophomore year in precalculus I decided to go for a Casio graphing calculator back in 1990. Texas Instruments was recommended. The only problem I had using a Casio was that model didn’t have polar graphing. So, I wrote a program to do it on the Casio. It probably helped me to understand polar graphing better.
Ben might like applying the BASIC programs in his math book to a graphing calculator?
In the past, I liked to create programs on the TI graphing calculators at the store to endlessly print on the screen text like “Hello.”
One thing I agree with the letter-writer about -- we may have been the last generation to grow up smarter than our computers. I had a Vic 20 in early grade school, than an Apple //c, then a 286-clone by middle school and then upgraded that piecemeal through college. Now I buy cheapish laptops from ebay that corporations have finished leasing.
Maybe it's fogey-ish of me, but it's nice to feel like I could scan a paper for errors faster than spellcheck could run on Bank Street Writer, or that my friends could draw better than any computer game. There was a sense of ceding power to the machine, temporarily, but we were still master. Now kids have machines that can do everything better than they can, right from the start -- but of course that just inspires some of them to come up with new things that they can do that simply use the computer, just as we did.
Oh, and I don't know if anyone's mentioned it yet, but ThinkGeek has a make-your-own-Pong kit.
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