Back in December Andrew expressed an interest in learning to program a computer. I did some googling and didn’t find much of anything related to kids programming. So I thought about what I used when I was his age. I used LOGO… so I loaded it up on his system and he played with it for a few days and then lost interest. I don’t blame him. When I was a kid the only other thing a computer could do was tell you that the command you typed was not recognized. He does like playing a rollercoaster builder program and a few other simulation type “games.” I always thought that someone should do something like the simulation games but with more of a focus on learning some programming concepts. That would make a great tool for teaching kids interested in learning computer programming.
Back in December my google-foo was just weak. The good folks at Carnegie Mellon University have this covered. Alice is a drag-n-drop object oriented based programming language with some built in tutoring. A friend at work pointed it out to me today and I played with it some tonight. I expect that Andrew is going to love it.
