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There are many more distractions these days, but I'm not sure that it's as clear cut as you suggest. It's really not that hard to get kids into some form of co

There are many more distractions these days, but I'm not sure that it's as clear cut as you suggest. It's really not that hard to get kids into some form of coding today. I've run a Scratch[1] club for 8-10 year olds at my daughter's school and every single one of the kids there loved it. By the end of the first hour, they were all producing some form of animation that they could control and all were desperate to come back for the following week. Compare that with the steep learning curve of BASIC on an 80s 8-bit machine. It would take days to get anything more exciting than "Hello World!" out of it. Most of the people I know who had Spectrums (I'm British) as kids never went near programming. Their entire use of the command line was LOAD "". [1] https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ - just in case anyone's never seen it.

300bps 12y ago
Your point is solid, but your experience with Scratch is different than mine. My 10 year old son had very little interest in Scratch. I'm not entirely sure of the reason for this but I think it is related to: 1) It was hard to distribute his creations 2) Lack of natural aptitude / ability 3) Too easy to consume without producing We had a little more success with Construct 2. The main difference being that the games could be distributed to an iPad or any other HTML 5 web browser effortlessly. Maybe Scratch addressed that already in the 18 months since we've used it?
- klez 12y ago
  May I suggest that you're starting from the premise that your kid is willing/able to learn programming and that programming is for everyone? As your parent suggested, not everyone who had computers back than had or felt the need to program them.
  - scoggs 12y ago
    Right. I think the next step would be to try and find a programming exercise that his son could make his own. Something that would self motivate him to solve a problem. I think this is one of the hardest parts of diving into any high level thinking skill or hobby: finding the motivation to take the first step on a years long journey.
  - 300bps 12y ago
    May I suggest that you're starting from the premise that your kid is willing/able to learn programming That is precisely why I put #2 in my list.
- prof_hobart 12y ago
  You can easily distribute Scratch apps via their web site, but it's not really designed as a language to build full iPad apps etc. Its main purpose is to make learning the basics (control blocks, variables etc) easy and fun. By the time you're anywhere near something that you can distribute, you would have had to learn most of those basics. If something else, like Construct 2, works for you that's great. I obviously don't know your kid, but I doubt that aptitude/ability is going to be a blocker from getting simple Scratch programs running. I know several others who've run classes to a wide range of ages and abilities and not one of the kids has failed to get to grips with the basics. I can accept that attitude/interest (wanting to consume rather than produce) is going to be an issue for some children, but that's always been the case. And no matter how easy or hard it is to make things, those children aren't going to want to program. My point was less about Scratch specifically - there's a few similarish programs out there that can be used instead. It's more that the incentive to learn and availability of distractions hasn't really changed in the 30 years since I was a kid, and if anything the barriers to getting into some form of programming have dropped drastically since those days.
sthreet 12y ago
In my personal opinion everyone should learn the basics of programming for the same reason everyone claims that everyone needs four years of English classes and science classes and history classes, because it helps you look at the world in a different way. In addition, I personally have found that if I try to make a program to do math for me, I understand the math way better. So thank you for teaching some people, because learning is fairly hard, though if you have a good teacher it doesn't seem like it would be as hard to me. What is Spectrums though?
- prof_hobart 12y ago
  Spectrums is plural of Spectrum, as in Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the computer that 90% of British kids had in the 80s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum).

300bps 12y ago

Your point is solid, but your experience with Scratch is different than mine. My 10 year old son had very little interest in Scratch. I'm not entirely sure of the reason for this but I think it is related to: 1) It was hard to distribute his creations 2) Lack of natural aptitude / ability 3) Too easy to consume without producing We had a little more success with Construct 2. The main difference being that the games could be distributed to an iPad or any other HTML 5 web browser effortlessly. Maybe Scratch addressed that already in the 18 months since we've used it?

klez 12y ago
May I suggest that you're starting from the premise that your kid is willing/able to learn programming and that programming is for everyone? As your parent suggested, not everyone who had computers back than had or felt the need to program them.
- scoggs 12y ago
  Right. I think the next step would be to try and find a programming exercise that his son could make his own. Something that would self motivate him to solve a problem. I think this is one of the hardest parts of diving into any high level thinking skill or hobby: finding the motivation to take the first step on a years long journey.
- 300bps 12y ago
  May I suggest that you're starting from the premise that your kid is willing/able to learn programming That is precisely why I put #2 in my list.
prof_hobart 12y ago
You can easily distribute Scratch apps via their web site, but it's not really designed as a language to build full iPad apps etc. Its main purpose is to make learning the basics (control blocks, variables etc) easy and fun. By the time you're anywhere near something that you can distribute, you would have had to learn most of those basics. If something else, like Construct 2, works for you that's great. I obviously don't know your kid, but I doubt that aptitude/ability is going to be a blocker from getting simple Scratch programs running. I know several others who've run classes to a wide range of ages and abilities and not one of the kids has failed to get to grips with the basics. I can accept that attitude/interest (wanting to consume rather than produce) is going to be an issue for some children, but that's always been the case. And no matter how easy or hard it is to make things, those children aren't going to want to program. My point was less about Scratch specifically - there's a few similarish programs out there that can be used instead. It's more that the incentive to learn and availability of distractions hasn't really changed in the 30 years since I was a kid, and if anything the barriers to getting into some form of programming have dropped drastically since those days.

sthreet 12y ago

In my personal opinion everyone should learn the basics of programming for the same reason everyone claims that everyone needs four years of English classes and science classes and history classes, because it helps you look at the world in a different way. In addition, I personally have found that if I try to make a program to do math for me, I understand the math way better. So thank you for teaching some people, because learning is fairly hard, though if you have a good teacher it doesn't seem like it would be as hard to me. What is Spectrums though?

prof_hobart 12y ago
Spectrums is plural of Spectrum, as in Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the computer that 90% of British kids had in the 80s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum).