My 7-year old son recently asked me how to program a computer. He wants to make his own games. I think my wife gave him the idea as an educational alternative to playing them.
There are a variety of solutions available, but we have initially gone for Alice, which is a 3D graphical programming environment especially designed for kids. I turns out to be simpler than I expected and quite a bit of fun too. We followed the tutorials together and my son was able to follow them most of the time. Later on, my 9-year old daughter zipped through them.
Programs are created entirely graphically and it is impossible to use incorrect syntax, which is great. I was dreading the messy “bad syntax” errors and other warts that plagued my programming upbringing.
The creators of Alice are working on a major new version in collaboration with Electronic Arts. The new version will use models and characters from The Sims.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Greg Harris // Feb 20, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Thanks for pointing Alice out. My kids were interested so I got them a program called KPL (Kids programming language). It’s basically a stripped down version of C# for kids.
They had a tough time with the syntax, so Alice looks like something they might pick up better.
2 Paul G // Feb 21, 2007 at 11:14 am
Thanks Greg. I looked at KPL and I think it’s the next step up from something like Alice. In fact, Alice introduces object-oriented programming in a very subtle and gentle way, so it does provide a useful step towards OOP.
3 derek // Feb 27, 2007 at 3:57 am
Paul,
You might also like to try fUNSoftWare http://funsoftware.sourceforge.net.
It is an alternate platform for Lego Mindstorms, so once you write something it has a really cool to run too.
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