[Chicago] python intro for 13 yo -- suggestions?

[Brantley Harris]

HyperCard was da-shit.  It was absolutely remarkable.  I remember
making an email application for my highschool (back when it wasn't
connected to the internet) so that students and teachers could "email"
eachother over the LAN.

If you really want to go down this road, I suggest Flash.  Flash is a
direct evolution of HyperCard, it just adds "layers" to the paradigm.
It's very fun, allowing you to interact with objects that you can draw
on the screen.  It holds your hand at the beginning (like HyperCard
did), but allows you to branch out to do whatever you want with a
prototype language that is very similar to JavaScript called
ActionScript.

Really though, one must think of the student.  If they are interested
in art, and graphics, Flash is perfect.  If they are more
mathmatically minded, I think Python is a better fit.  And if you
really want to get them on a rigorous track, C/C++ all the way.

On 7/11/06, Jason R Huggins <JRHuggins at thoughtworks.com> wrote:
> A brief tangent... Although I dabbled with BASIC in DOS as a kid, I
> remember *really* getting interested in programming back in '88 at age 12
> when I first saw HyperCard on an Apple Mac used in a science presentation
> by a professor at the local college. [I swear my Mom made me go, it wasn't
> my idea. :-) ] HyperCard has always been hard to categorize, but in this
> context, it was being used as a "poor man's PowerPoint". My jaw dropped in
> disbelief when, half-way through his presentation, the presenter noticed a
> bug with his "next page" button, switched to "edit" mode in HyperCard,
> opened the source code behind the button, fixed the bug, then continued on
> with the rest of his presentation.  Before I saw that, I never knew
> software could be changed on-the-fly like that.  (Granted, I was only 11
> so I was easily amazed then.) I spent the rest of that summer learning
> HyperCard and its scripting language, HyperTalk, so that I could find out
> how that professor accomplished such an amazing feat of editing live code
> in a running application.