Choosing a First Programming Language for Kids and Beginners

I think the best way to teach kids about programming is giving them a Micro-Bit and letting them build whatever they want with it. Maybe they want to make games on it, maybe they want to setup a mini weather station, all that’s viable with it and the national program we’ve had running in Denmark for a while now, has likely been the most successful of its kind. I think the Micro-bit has something similar to scratch as well as Python and JavaScript, but I think language is a lot less important than the fact that you can build something useful/fun relatively quick. This way programming becomes a “hobby” class like astronomy was to most of us before it turned out to be all math. ;)

For CS students I’ve seen a lot of approaches. I’m an external examiner and as such I get to go through the “intro” courses two times a year, often with different languages and philosophies. The one I liked the best, was a school that copier Harvard’s approach. They start by giving students a basic understanding of how the computer works, as well as the aching basic computation with scratch. Then they move on to C, using what they’ve just learned about computers and computation in a manner that has the students building things like cyphers and crackers, and then they go into C# (could be python/java/ruby/jot lib/go/whatever but C# is big in Denmark so it makes sense here because it’ll help students get jobs). I’m a big fan of JavaScript because of how universal it is, and how easy it is to get a development setup running, but I think using C and computation together quickly teaches students how computers and programming languages works, which will be very valuable to them when they move on to building things in whatever they do. The students coming from that particular school are almost always better at first year CS than their competition who started out with JAVA/C#/Python, at least in my opinion.