Friday, May 25, 2007

Programming and Kids - A followup...

Well, after my delight last week at finding out about 'Scratch' and 'HacketyHack' and thinking what a great way to get kids involved in programming, I showed them my 12 year old son. Imagine the look on his face when he could see how interesting and fascinating this all is!

OK, you'll just have to imagine it, the same that I had to imagine it. What really happened was that his eyes glazed over, his top lip curled up, and he gave me that look that I think meant 'you poor old git, what are you showing me this for', and then he uttered those words that any almost-teenager would utter...'Uh', 'Wot', 'have you seen my iPod'.

Well, there is still time - I didn't set eyes on a computer until I was 18 years old.

Meanwhile, I rather like HacketyHack and might just play around with it. Scratch is a clever idea, has a great UI, but I'd rather see the code that it generates behind the scenes as well as the UI.

2 comments:

Valcael said...

Also studying M359 and I have 4 boys one interestd in computing. He was impressed wih simple SQL as what happens behind Access so I'll see what he thinks. The little two (9, 10) write interactive PPT presentations and say they've written games so ...

Simon said...

Hi valcael,

Thanks for your comments. Good luck with that. 'Scratch' looks like a lot of fun - I found myself tinkering with it the other week when really I should have been studying!
I'm going to show it to my daughter (she is 10) to see what she makes of it. She loves maths, and animals, so may take an interest in it.
Simon.

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