teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 10:52 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: That is a gross exaggeration. For 2006, the stats I could find without spending all morning, it looks like this: US Civilian Population - 230M US Civilian Labor Force - 150M Estimated number of "Computer Programmers" (Seried ID EEU80737101) - 700K So as of a few years ago, in the US, it's more like one in 200 active workers was classified as a programmer, not one in a million. One can debate how many of those are "career programmers", but I think the order of magnitude is close enough. I also think that there is a significant difference between teaching elementary/middle-school children (6-12) and college students (18-23) specifically in reference to abstractness. Young adults pursuing a technical education are going to be able to handle abstract concepts better than someone half their age or younger (or they are going to be finding a new field of study ;-). Having learned these concepts before age 12 and having taught workshops (as an amateur, not certified, teacher), my experience tells me that if you want to teach programming concepts to the age 6-12 crowd, it's important to start with very concrete examples and build on those to abstraction, much like teaching arithmetic is easier by putting items on a table and having a child count and group real objects before moving on to mathematical notation (numbers, symbols, etc). To that end, I don't see how teaching BASIC, even 1980s BASIC with its limitations and line numbers and all, is a terrible way to introduce simple concepts like assignment, input and output, branching and control flow. You can do a lot with LET (optional typically, I know, but useful educationally), PRINT, INPUT, GOTO, and uncomplicated IF/THEN/GOTO statements. FOR loops, subroutines, arrays, etc., are easy to add in later, and may be easier if the students have encountered sets and arrays in their math classes. I would posit that trying to teach recursion as a programming concept is likely to be frustrating unless the students have encountered factorials in math as well. It's a hard enough concept to teach when it's just trying to explain what 5! is, let alone asking a student to abstract the concept to general recursion (and besides, unless you are doing certain kinds of tree walking or string searches, how often _have_ you written recursive routines? I don't do it as often as once in five years with the kind of code I write). Five-ish years ago, I got involved with a thread on the author/futurist David Brin's blog because he was looking for a contemporary way to provide a BASIC environment for his, IIRC, 13-year-old son to learn on. There were examples of BASIC code in his son's math book, but it took extra (and not well known by the general public) steps to get BASIC onto a Mac or PC of the day. Since he was looking for a small computer that would be used specifically for this purpose, not a toolset to load onto a "modern" machine, I pointed out several kit computers (like the MicroKIM and Spare Time Gizmos Elf 2000) that could run Tiny BASIC. I would be curious to learn what ever developed from that inquiry. It's only one datapoint, but it's via someone who took an active interest in furthering their own child's education, so IMO, one worth examining. For those that might want to dabble lightly with 1980s Commodore BASIC on a modern machine, let me shamelessly plug http://sourceforge.net/projects/cbmbasic/ -ethan -- References: http://pw1.netcom.com/~rdavis2/employ08.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/43888.html