🚀 go-pugleaf

> My ten year old daughter has been asking me to teach her to program.
> She has had a little exposure to computers at school, but there has
> not been any real programming.  I've gotten a copy of mswLogo, but
> now I don't know what the next step should be.

...

> I'd like to hear from others who have experience with teaching their
> own children.  I'd also be interested in some discussion about the
> merits of some of the other programming language choices: BASIC,
> SCHEME, SmallTalk, C, anything else?  By the way, I'm using a pc
> clone running DOS 5 and windows.

I don't have experience teaching a child that age, but I started
programming around that age (maybe a little older, I was 10 in 1977).
What really got me hooked on writing programs was graphics.  My
favorite part was fiddling around to see what the computer could do,
discovering something, and then letting it keep generating ideas until
it got boring.  Then I'd choose something else to work on.  The
important things were:

	1) interactive programming with graphics (I didn't have Logo,
	I used BASIC on TRS-80 machines).

	2) simple reference manuals:  a list of the available
	commands/functions and what they do.  If there isn't something
	like that available, you could write down a few of the
	important Logo constructs yourself with a short description.
	At that age, lists of commands were easier for me to
	understand than prose descriptions of how to program.

	3) sample code:  I learned tons by looking at example programs
	and modifying them until I figured out how the worked.

I'm sure that every child is different, but I enjoyed my parents not
being too involved in what I was doing.  Intellectual stimulation
helped, though.  Talk with your child about what she is working on.
Show some interest.  Then let her hack away.  I bet you'll be
surprised what she comes up with.  

Maybe you could write a couple of simple graphics programs in Logo and
demonstrate them to her.  Show her how to interact with the system and
move the turle around.  Once you get over the hump of getting sharp
kids interested, they do the rest.

After she works with Logo a while (if that's what you choose), it
might be fun to expose her to Scheme.  It's a beautiful language for
developing programming ideas and it's similar to Logo in some
respects.   "The Little Lisper" by Friedman and Felleisen (MIT Press)
is a great book for learning the basics of Scheme/Lisp.

Best of luck,
Brent

--
Brent Benson                     brent@ssd.csd.harris.com
Systems Software Development
Harris Computer Systems