[TriLUG] Teaching Kids to Program

[Francois Dion via TriLUG]

Ken,

Python is great for that. Tripython is a great group of folks that can
help. And project nights are great for kids. I'll always be grateful to my
father for taking me to the university lab as a  kid and be able to
interact with a bunch of students turned teachers for a moment, learning
logo, then basic and then assembler.

You can also venture in the browser based python environments, like
http://trinket.io/ or http://brython.info both of these supporting turtle
graphics within the python environment. And it scales from tiny
microcontrollers (micropython) to large clusters (currently doing a lot of
python in datascience / big data / hadoop ) so you have a very very large
potential playground. We just did recently a high altitude balloon flight,
everything python, including subsequent datascience from the data gathered
in flight. And this week we are starting a UAV project (sorry, not local,
it's in Winston Salem). By far though, the good old raspberry pi workshops
were the most popular over the years, particularly with pygames.

Francois


On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Ken MacKenzie via TriLUG <
trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> So if you were going to teach your kids some starter programming, what
> language and/or ide would you use?
>
> The oldest 2 *ages 9 and 10 are the two I am targeting at the moment.  And
> before anyone gets into the ide or not to ide thing, the reason I mention
> that is even though I am a person who will still do a web page in vim I do
> appreciate what an ide for creating a GUI can bring to the table,
> especially when learning.
>
> So for languages that offer good starting points I was thinking one of the
> following:
>
> FreeBasic
> Logo (I am assuming there has to be some Logo implementation on Linux)
> Python
> Golang (probably not a good first choice but I do a lot in Go lately so we
> can "learn together"
>
> I think I am leaning towards python, I think one of the things that makes
> me lean towards that is libraries like pygame which I think if they take to
> this will be right up their alley.
>
> If it matters the computer's in question are running either Mint 17 or
> Debian Jessie.  I am kind of halfway between the migration of moving Mint
> out in favor of Jessie in the house.
>
> Ken
> --
> This message was sent to: Francois Dion <francois.dion at gmail.com>
> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to trilug-leave at trilug.org from that
> address.
> TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> Unsubscribe or edit options on the web  :
> http://www.trilug.org/mailman/options/trilug/francois.dion%40gmail.com
> Welcome to TriLUG: http://trilug.org/welcome




-- 
raspberry-python.blogspot.com - www.pyptug.org - www.3DFutureTech.info -
@f_dion