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

On 2 Jan 2012 at 21:43, Fred Cisin wrote: I taught myself S/360 machine language by sitting with dumps decoding instructions by hand and then figuring out what the code did. I learned about a few "undocumented" SVCs in DOS/360 that way. But, there's no one way to learn anything. Do you teach Smalltak or Logo first? Do you give someone a bag of marbles and three bowls and tell them to write program for that? Would a born-in-Montgomery Alabama native pass a bonehead English- language class in Bonn? (When I was a freshman in high school, we had what we thought was a "ringer" in Spanish class--a girl from Mexico who had little command of English. Since our class was taught entirely in Spanish, we figured her for an automatic "A". She flunked--she couldn't get her head around the structure of the language, such as case and verb tenses). So, could a whizbang script kiddie write a FORTRAN program to find square roots using Newton-Raphson? I don't know. I think the choice of programming language is largely irrelevant. You could probably use RPG as an effective teaching tool. I once tried to help a kindergarten teacher with her computer course-- programming in BASIC. I wound up with a bad headache for not being able to couch my teaching in her skillset. I've since left teaching to the professionals. --Chuck