Teaching python (programming) to children

[Carlos Gaston Alvarez]

I started programming when I was a child and english is not my mother
language, so I can speak throught experience.
Childs dont need commands in thear own language.
Most words are new, so they learn the new word as if it where of their own
language.

ex:

imprimir "hello world"

surely you should not learn spanish to know what it means, once you have
read on the manual what it does ... or you have tryed it. So imprimir for
you would mean  "print it in the computer's screen"

There is the key point, childs need good documentation in their own
language. I started learning english for real when I realised that if I was
going to learn more about computers, I should learn it in english.

The second great point is that they need a goal, been having fun the best of
all.

My father bought a computer program, so I (the little computer genious)
could learn it and help him on his work. Result, total failure. Later, when
I was grown up, well, I knew what it was expected of me and I realized that
I knew how to do it, it was just that with my child's point on view I found
it useless. If i would have known the real goal may be I would have solved
the 'problem' (there was not  a problem at all) but I saw things as useless.
On the other hand I knew (and was doing it ) how to program small computer
games, which where much more complex. So keep in mind the childs point of
view.

So, it seems that the most important for them is that they get the language
doing that they want to do. And HAVE FUN in the process. The lesser the
learning curve, the more reward they have for learning and the more that
they will want to learn. May be that the best way to teach them is to give
them a computer game and teach them how to improve it. Ok, it should not be
too complex. They will add complexity as they learn more.


Chau,

Gaston



----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Elmegaard" <brian at rk-speed-rugby.dk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
To: <python-list at python.org>
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2001 10:55 AM
Subject: Teaching python (programming) to children


> Hi,
>
> in the special Python issue of Linux Journal last year Guido explained
> one of the perspectives of the future was children sitting in class
> writing python code for a lot of different applications.
>
> I think that Python may be very well suited for this because it is
> easy to get going with the language compared to other languages
> (AFAICS).
>
> However, in order to program you need to be able to write. And out of
> the English-speaking world, learning English will be one obstacle
> delaying the learning of programming.
>
> So, any comments are appreciated, especially on: Are there good reasons
> for advocating python being a language one could teach children
> programming with and are there perspectives in translating python to many
> different languages in order to facilitate this, or will children not be
> ready for learning programming before they have learnt English after all?
> --
> Brian (remove the sport for mail)
> http://www.rk-speed.dk http://fiduso.dk http://sunsite.auc.dk/dk-tug
> \TeX, tak.
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>