Suggestions on starting a child programming [closed]

Question

I would suggest LEGO Mindstorm, it provides an intuitive drag and drop interface for programming and because it comes with hardware it provides something tangible for a child to grasp. Also, because it is "LEGO" they might think of it as more of a game then a programming exercise.

My day job is in a school, and over the past few years I've seen or taught (or attempted to teach) various children, in various numbers, programming lessons.

Children are all different - some are quick learners, some aren't. In particular, some have better literacy skills than others, and that definitely makes a difference to the speed at which they'll pick up programming. I bet that most of us here, as professional computer programmers and the kind of people who read and post to forums for fun, learnt to read at a pretty young age. For those kinds of children, and if it's your own child who you can teach one-on-one, you could do worse than JavaScript - it has the advantage that you can do real stuff with it right away, and the edit-test cycle is simply hitting "refresh" in the browser. It gets confusing when you start to run in to how JavaScript does everything asynchronously, and is tricky to debug, but for a bright child under close tuition these problems can be overcome.

LEGO Mindstorms is definitely up there at the top of the list. Most schools now super-glue the bricks together to create pre-made models that can't have bits nicked off of them, but this shouldn't be a problem at home. Over on the Times Educational Supplement site (website forum for the UK's weekly teaching newspaper), the "what programming language is best for children?" topic comes up pretty regularly. Lots of recommendations over there for Scratch as an alternative to Mindstorms - bit more freedom than Mindstorms, again probably better for the brighter student who could also be given a soldering iron.

I've found that slower pupils can still have problems with Mindstorms, even though the programming environment is "graphical" - there's still a lot going on on screen, and there's a fair bit to remember (this was an older version, mind - haven't tried the snazzy new one yet). In my experience, the best all-round introduction to programming is probably still LOGO - actually a considerably more powerful language than most people give it credit for. The original Mindstorms book by Seymour Papert (nothing to do with LEGO - they nicked the title of the book for their product), one of the originators of LOGO, is the canonical reference for teaching programming to children as a "thinking skill" and for the concept of Constructionism in learning.

We've had classes of 7 or 8 year-olds programming LOGO. Note that we aren't aiming to make them "software developers", that's a career path they can decide on at some point post-16. At a young age we're trying to get them to think of "computer programming" as just another tool - how to set out a problem to be solved by a computer, in the same way they might use a mind map to help them organise and remember stuff for an exam. No poor child should be sat down and drilled in the minutia and use of a particular language, they should be left to explore and figure stuff out as they like.

I'll second Geoff's suggestions of Phrogram (used to be KPL), and Alice.

My only other suggestion is Lego Mindstorms NXT. The NXT's programming language is drag-and-drop, is very easy to use, and can do some very complicated tasks once you learn it. Also young boys usually like seeing things move. :)

I've used Alice and NXTs with some young kids, and they've taken to it very well.

Two possibilities are:

Scratch - developed at MIT - http://scratch.mit.edu/

and

EToys from the One Laptop per Child fame - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Squeak

Full disclosure: I'm one of the guys who invented Kid's Programming Language, which is now http://www.Phrogram.com, which others have recommended here. Let me add some programmer-oriented info about it.

It's a code IDE, rather than drag-and-drop, or designer-based. This was intentional on our part - we wanted to make it easy and fun to do real text-based programming, particularly programming games and graphics. This is a fundamental difference between us and Alice and Scratch. Which you pick is a matter of the kid, their age and aptitudes, your goals. Using them serially with the same beginner might be a great way to go - if you do that, I would recommend Scratch, Alice, Phrogram as the order. Phrogram has worked best for 12 years and up, but I know dads with 6 year olds who have taught their kids with it, and I know 10 year olds who have taught themselves with it.

The language is as much like English as we could make it, and is as minimal as we could make it. The secret sauce is in the class-based object heirarchy, which is again as simple, intuitive and English-like as we could make it. The object heirarchy is optimized for games and graphics. 3D models are available, and 2D sprites. Absolute movement using screen coordinates is supported, or relative movement ala LOGO turtles - Forward(x), TurnLeft(y).

The IDE comes with over 100 examples, some language examples (loops), some learning examples (arrays), some fully-functional games and sims (Pong, Missile Command, Game of Life).

To give you a sense of how highly leveraged we made the language and the IDE: with 27 instructions you can fly a 3D spaceship model around a 3D skybox, using your keyboard. The same with a 2D sprite is 12 to 15 instructions.

We are working on a Blade-compatible release of Phrogram that will allow programs to run on the XBox 360. Yeah, the XBox, on your big TV. Nice motivator for getting a kid started? :)

Phrogram includes support for class-based programming, with methods and properties - but that's only encapsulation, not inheritance or polymorphism.

A tutorial and user guide is available,

My own ebook is available at Amazon and other places online, "Learn to Program with Phrogram!," and gets a beginner started by programming the classic Pong.

Phrogram Programming for the Absolute Beginner, by Jerry Lee Ford, Jr., is also available, as a paperback, at Amazon and elsewhere.