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today's 10 year old is probably writing a twitter script in python in 2 days. as a non-video-game-playing female i didn't find programming approachable then, b

by diN0bot 18y ago

today's 10 year old is probably writing a twitter script in python in 2 days. as a non-video-game-playing female i didn't find programming approachable then, but i have found it approachable in the past 2 years. i can't speak for 10 year olds, though. there are numerous improvements in the approachability aspect (scratch, alice, processing, arduino on the educational front). i suspect approachability had little to do with you success as a 10 year old. your argument is simply that BASIC was available when you were 10 and now you can't think of modern fun tools and fun tasks. letsmakerobots and instructables come to mind as good starting places.

tsetse-fly 18y ago
I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language. The majority of today's 10 year olds are not writing twitter scripts. It requires a significant amount of understanding and time to do so. You need to pick a programming language, install it, figure out how to write your program and how to execute it. The barrier is a lot higher than writing a program for your calculator during math class. It'd be much easier for you to find people who wrote trivial programs on their Commodore when they were 10 than it would be to find 10 year olds who are writing python.
- plinkplonk 18y ago
  " I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language." I agree. If Commodores or Amigas were available today, I'd buy one for my 5 year old nephew so that he could fiddle around with it, play some simple games, write some small programs and so on. Maybe there is a market for a small computing device that has the "instantly have something running, but is completely hackable" characteristic.
gaius 18y ago
I'm an experienced developer, but when I wanted to write a Jabber 'bot in Python, well, it took longer to get an account for it from our Domain Admins than it took to write. In 50 lines I had something that was doing useful work (in this case, relaying alerts from the monitoring system into a Jabber conference). This sort of thing is incredibly accessible to anyone who wants to do it. The stuff an 10-year-old with a free language and an ADSL connection can do today dwarfs what I could do at that age. I think _why rather likes the idea of himself as the Pied Piper, but the situation is nowhere near as bleak as he makes out.
- tsetse-fly 18y ago
  It's not as accessible as BASIC on a TI calculator, where many kids are introduced to programming. I don't think it's a coincidence that the situation was similar on Commodores/Ataris. Deciding that you need a programming language installed and then picking one and installing it is a very big step. It was a fluke that many of the people posting in this thread discovered programming. They stumbled upon the editor, tapped out a couple lines, and something happened. Cool! Python is certainly accessible to an experienced developer, but a 10-year-old's curiosity is superficial. They need to tinker and receive instant gratification without the barriers of setting up an environment. Programming isn't integrated and exposed in a dead-simple way to foster experimentation these days.
  - gaius 18y ago
    Well it is a matter of perspective. If you're a kid and your family has a Mac you just sit down and type python and you're in. Whereas how many 10 year olds even today have graphing calculators? Do kids even use calculators any more or is it all "new maths"?
    - diN0bot 18y ago
      gaius, you and i are on the same wavelength. the old skool calculators and video games is actually a very narrow approachability (as someone who never had either nor was much interested in either), but is significantly more present on this site. however the new skool method--macs for trendy teens and college folk, or processing for artists, or good old scratch and alice for young kids--is much more present seizure-inducing social network sites, or off the web scene altogether. the anecdotal data here is significantly skewed. the real power of approachability is the variety of people doing technical projects now who otherwise were too intimidated in the past.

by diN0bot 18y ago

tsetse-fly 18y ago

I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language. The majority of today's 10 year olds are not writing twitter scripts. It requires a significant amount of understanding and time to do so. You need to pick a programming language, install it, figure out how to write your program and how to execute it. The barrier is a lot higher than writing a program for your calculator during math class. It'd be much easier for you to find people who wrote trivial programs on their Commodore when they were 10 than it would be to find 10 year olds who are writing python.

plinkplonk 18y ago
" I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language." I agree. If Commodores or Amigas were available today, I'd buy one for my 5 year old nephew so that he could fiddle around with it, play some simple games, write some small programs and so on. Maybe there is a market for a small computing device that has the "instantly have something running, but is completely hackable" characteristic.

gaius 18y ago

I'm an experienced developer, but when I wanted to write a Jabber 'bot in Python, well, it took longer to get an account for it from our Domain Admins than it took to write. In 50 lines I had something that was doing useful work (in this case, relaying alerts from the monitoring system into a Jabber conference). This sort of thing is incredibly accessible to anyone who wants to do it. The stuff an 10-year-old with a free language and an ADSL connection can do today dwarfs what I could do at that age. I think _why rather likes the idea of himself as the Pied Piper, but the situation is nowhere near as bleak as he makes out.

tsetse-fly 18y ago
It's not as accessible as BASIC on a TI calculator, where many kids are introduced to programming. I don't think it's a coincidence that the situation was similar on Commodores/Ataris. Deciding that you need a programming language installed and then picking one and installing it is a very big step. It was a fluke that many of the people posting in this thread discovered programming. They stumbled upon the editor, tapped out a couple lines, and something happened. Cool! Python is certainly accessible to an experienced developer, but a 10-year-old's curiosity is superficial. They need to tinker and receive instant gratification without the barriers of setting up an environment. Programming isn't integrated and exposed in a dead-simple way to foster experimentation these days.
- gaius 18y ago
  Well it is a matter of perspective. If you're a kid and your family has a Mac you just sit down and type python and you're in. Whereas how many 10 year olds even today have graphing calculators? Do kids even use calculators any more or is it all "new maths"?
  - diN0bot 18y ago
    gaius, you and i are on the same wavelength. the old skool calculators and video games is actually a very narrow approachability (as someone who never had either nor was much interested in either), but is significantly more present on this site. however the new skool method--macs for trendy teens and college folk, or processing for artists, or good old scratch and alice for young kids--is much more present seizure-inducing social network sites, or off the web scene altogether. the anecdotal data here is significantly skewed. the real power of approachability is the variety of people doing technical projects now who otherwise were too intimidated in the past.