Programming and Kids

I have son - he's 12 years old. A few years ago I showed him the Logo environment - showed him how he could get it to draw boxes, repeating shapes, etc. He was curious - but not that curious.

At school he has ICT lessons - but these are all about how to use Microsoft type applications such as Word or Powerpoint. The teachers clearly think that these are the skills that kids need these days. Perhaps they do, I'm not sure. But these skills can be picked up easily enough anyway. I once asked the head of ICT at his school at what age they start teaching them about programming - how to change what a computer can do, about how computers really work. His answer was that they don't teach that stuff! Its not part of the National Curriculum.

Now, my son has a computer, he can download music, play games, keep in touch with his friends (much in the same way that I would have used a telephone, or met up in the playground back in my day!). And he knows (because I have shown him) that a computer has a motherboard, and processor chips, and memory, and disks, etc, but he still doesn't know how a computer works (though he's a dab hand at PowerPoint for his homework assignments!).

Then yesterday on the BBC Website was an article about some research that MIT have been doing in the area of programming and getting kids interested. They have this environment called 'Scratch' (http://scratch.mit.edu) that uses visual elements to create sounds, animated sprites etc. It has conditional logic, looping constructs and the like. Yesterday their website was down due to the high amount of traffic but they quickly got a tempory site up. Its quite interesting - I've had a play around with it, and I'm hoping to get my son looking at it and having a play around too. We'll see what happens.

And, like buses, another website has just come to my attention that it also aimed at getting kids (and adults) interested in programming. This one is called 'hacketyhack' (http://hacketyhack.net) and provides an introduction to programming this time using the Ruby language (one of my favourites) so, in a sense, it takes a more traditional approach but in a way that makes it useful and fun. I'm not sure that a 12 year old will be quite so interested in this one but, again, we'll see.