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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

I think you are thinking about this exactly the wrong way.

You don't start with the abstract. You start with the concrete.

I disagree. That approach might work for teaching CS to college students, but most young children would find it boring. A much larger percentage would find the idea of making an interactive story fun than would enjoy learning about the low-level mechanics of a computer.

Why do you think they would find it boring?

In part, because I did.

I started with BASIC, but didn't really get in to it before being introduced to Hypercard. With that, I could make cool stuff almost immediately. A year or so later, I was told that real programming meant programming in C, so I tried that. It made me lose interest in programming for quite some time, as I couldn't imagine making any of the things I wanted to make with it.

It's more or less the same issue that affects technically cool products that don't actually address the needs of consumers.

You are asuming that everyone is like you? Bad premise to begin with.

There are a lot of children to whom programming isn't even in their vocabulary, but storytelling is.

I also remember other kids learning to program as pre-teens or early teens. Most of them wanted to learn to program so they could make things, not for its own sake. Most things that were interesting to them would be burdensome to write in C.

So, teach them ARM9/Arduino/PIC/X86/other assembly? (I wonder how many people here as kids first learned to program by typing in assembly programs from magazines.)

Just because we used to do something does not mean it's the most effective way to do it.

The point here is to teach children (not just hacker wiz kids) some basic premises of programming without making it about programming.

It's pretty clever IMHO and it allow children to create exactly the world they want to create whether that is vampires or bunny land.

"Just because we used to do something does not mean it's the most effective way to do it."

True, but the fact that we used to do it also doesn't mean that it must be broken. I doubt many of would be better programmers if we had a more child-friendly programming language to learn when we were young.

Instead of thinking about this as a way to learn programming think about it as a way to internalize the principles of programming by removing some of the abstraction.

Think of this as php for children. An easy to use forgiving environment that welcome everyone not just the few who have the stamina and interest to learn assembler.

And think of this as the future of programming languages as they will become more and more abstracted from the core.

Those who want to dig deeper can.

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