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As someone who teached programming to many people on and off for the last 25 years, I still think nothing beats LOGO or Scratch. No tooling problems, no braces
by KingOfCoders 6y ago
As someone who teached programming to many people on and off for the last 25 years, I still think nothing beats LOGO or Scratch. No tooling problems, no braces (in Scratch), no complicated syntax (what does "->" mean?). A programming language for beginners is NOT a dumbed down version of your functional/OO language of choice.
Turtle graphics helps people deconstruct problems into smaller parts - the essence of programming - and abstract over your solutions to solve more general problems. As a second step I use some IoT board with Scratch so people can turn on LEDs or react to sound which makes them motivated.
My first teaching 20y ago was with Java and it was a disaster. People struggled with the tool, syntax errors, semantics, braces and in the end could write some Java programs but did not understand what programming was about and could not solve their own problems.
+ Several submissions on one day.
- raghav_nautiyal 6y agoThanks! I'll try my best to improve.
- siraben 6y agoAs a hackathon project I made a language[0] inspired by LOGO but using Unicode characters for the drawing primitives (presumably children could have some physics buttons or GUI to insert them). It also has support for loops and subroutines but otherwise it's a limited DSL like LOGO. [0] https://github.com/siraben/vpl https://github.com/siraben/vpl
- raghav_nautiyal 6y agoThat sounds great! Will definitely give it a try!
- forgotpwd16 6y agoThough most overlook it and/or consider it a toy language, Logo is a good educational language while remaining powerful. See for example [1]. It is also used beyond learning with some implementations specialized in agent-based modeling. [1]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo-sample.html https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo-sample.html
- mimixco 6y agoLOGO is a Lisp, which is what makes it great. I owe my entire programming career to learning LOGO as a kid.
- Jaxan 6y agoI learned with turtle graphics and similar things. For me the visual aspect was really important and fun!
- KingOfCoders 6y agoThe visual aspects is very important to beginners, they get immediate visual feedback of the effects of their program. Cause (code) and effects are very easy to see.