Getting kids started

Hi Brian,

Just clicked to reply, then realised or should that be realized you are in N Carolina USA !!

Needless to say I'm in the UK, but anyway, I was reading your post and thinking, Did I write this? because I'm right there with you.  I have a 12, 8, and 6 year old, and I'm keen to use them as guinea pigs to test my non teaching skills!  I'm not computer minded nor scientific, just a desire to be part of Pi and go with the flow to see where it ends.

Very much like you I've ordered my pi, again there seems to be a delay.. (is there an opportunity here..) I too, am learning, from scratch. (Oh, We'll come back to that in a mo) so via Learnpython the hard way.org, I studied the command prompt bit first now I'm up to ex12. So would be interested in sharing your ideas as we live so far apart!

Anyway, I did want to say, my kids are taken with Scratch, being the modular graphic building program that comes with the O/S for Python, and is easily downloaded from the Internet as a stand alone. Now all I need to know is how to steer them from just wanting to make pretty pictures and use its animation qualities. The other thing you may find is if you google "teach your children python" there's an interesting looking blog from a fellow country man of yours in the first ten results.

So take care, and I look forward to seeing Raspberry Pi progress with the kids across the world too.

Shutz

WOW, what a coincidence.  Yes, we must keep in touch.

Right now I'm going through the agony - yes, agony - of installing Debian Linux on an old Dell

8500 Inspiron. (Oh, for the funds to buy one pre-configured.)

Thanks for the tip on Scratch. I heard the name mentioned on a local (60 miles away) Linux

user group that recently held a Raspberry Pi meeting, but did not know what it was.

Now, where in the UK are you?

Regards,

Brian

Hi Brian,

Ok, Like I said I'm not particular clever on this bit, i thought I was installing Ubunto onto a virtual drive on my Windows 7 laptop, only to find i had partitioned my hard drive and now have dual operating systems. At least thats what I think has happened. I did this to get closer to Linux, and to give me aheads up on Raspberry Pi.

If you look at Scratch, or rather let the kids look at it, they will just run with it, I'm wondering or guessing, do you check out Mag Pi, the Raspberry's online mag, they have about 9 issues now, and each has Scratch "games" to make. it could be a foundation for you to build from, there is also a Python Pit in it, where by they give you coding for more and more complex programs.

Ok, Need to catch a train, as its time to head home,

oh i live in the West Midlands town/city called Hereford! I'm sure I have a GPS location for it somewhere LOL.

Take care

Paul.

Brian & Paul,

I'm headed down the same road you two are.  The primary target is kids at my grand-daughter's school (grades K-8).  I'm still wrestling with which language to use.  I originally planned to start with Scratch and progress on to Python.  But, I have no experience with either of those.  I do have a fair amount of experience with VBA for Excel, but my favorite going back nearly 30 years is Pascal.  I did a little poking around and found a free version of Turbo Pascal and a free version of Borland's Delphi.  Now I'm wrestling with whether to go with my strength but a language that's a dead end or jump in and learn yet another language.  Also, I have no experience teaching younger children and no experience teaching programming.  In fact, I had a professor in a Management Science course who announced mid-semester that we had two areas left to cover, statistics and computer programming.  He then declared that statistics could be taught but not learned and computer programming could be learned but not taught.  He pretty much proceeded to validate both assertions .  Anyhow, if I come up with anything I'll let you know and I'll keep an eye on this thread.

Best regards,

Ralph Shade

BTW - since we're sharing location information, I'm in Southern California - Ventura County specifically, but was born and raised in South Carolina.  So Brian, we're kind of almost neighbors!

I havent had any experience teaching kids that young. But I have done a lot of programming tutoring.  As a full time programmer here is my advice.

dont use debian. scrap the install, and use CentOS or Ubuntu instead. Debian is a great distro, but its massively painful if you arent experienced with linux. For your desktop environment, I personally prefer gnome over KDE. KDE is too busy for my tastes, but its really just a matter of preference. Install both though even if you wont use them. you'll find some programs require them to be installed.

I would also avoid python. Its very easy sure, until you have an error. And you will have an error. but you wont see it. Because its in whitespace. Somewhere in code you will have spaces instead of a tab, and thats seriously the most annoying error to debug in the world.

As a fist language, I really want to suggest Perl, but its honestly too easy and that makes it _really_ easy to pick up bad habits. Smalltalk is a pretty good option as well. Some definite DONTS: C, pascal/delphi, C++,D, Java, C#, javascript. Those guys are either exceedingly difficult, have some really sneaky gotchas, or both.

At the end of the day though, the most important thing about programming is the thought process. It really doesnt matter what language you speak if you dont know what you want to say. or in other words, you have to know what you want to say, before you can think about how to say it. (i hope that makes sense)

Thats really the biggest issue for people in my experience. They dont seem to break the steps down enough for it to make sense as code. They want to simply walk instead of move right foot forward. shift weight to right foot. balance. move left foot forward. shift weight to left foot. balance. repeat. So maybe start with lesson(s) focusing on how to break things down into algorithms. whether its walking or baking a pretty cake they need to be able to identify all the steps from start to finish.

As far as using raspis, consider that you will probably also need to purchase: power supply, keyboard, mouse, and monitor for each raspi. So thats perhaps an additional 50 bucks or so. You can easily get a good used laptop for that price. I dont know how many you intend to buy, but raspis also seem to be in limited supply. food for thought.

ETA: When it comes to first programming projects, im a sucker for physical stuff. It doesnt have to be robots or anything that fancy. Just something you can write in code then see work in the real world. You could start with a perl script that turns on an LED. Then add a photoresistor and the appropriate code to make it so the light only comes on when its dark. ... next thing you know, youve made this badboy http://youtu.be/NO47IX9lz-s

Thanks, shutz, for bringing "The MagPi" to my attention.

Jim

Ok, so where are all the Brits!!

Sorry, I am so much into the Pi, I keep forgetting that this is a general electronics/ computing community. I took Brian's original post as a request to help kids, and then with my own personal views of Pi (in that it is THE computer for kids), I raced off down this alley! I note Robert's reply re operational concerns, but the Pi team are trying to encourage kids with simple programs and programming, so I thought I would try python out anyway. Now I'm aware of the whitespace issue, I'm sure we can come up with a solution to it, as we go.

Love the way you guys can say 300 miles is just next door!!

The MagPi is a great resource but I'd also strongly recommend that you download and take a look at the Raspberry Pi Educational Manual, it is Free !! and will provide you more insight about the Rpi for education, scratch, etc.

Scratch is a great and very intutitive language to introduce young kids to the basics of programming, it is a graphic visual language much better for the job than the old Logo, older kids when they understand the basics and the building blocks of a program can switch to Python that will help them grasp concepts for structured programming without having to dig too much into C or other langs.

There are also many other publications that can help you like Getting started guides/books.

Around here I'm in the process of getting something started, I'll share what we learn.

-J

Thanks, Jamodio,

I'm looking at the Manual now!! Interested that you seem to think younger kids will be better with Scratch. I guess you are right, as I keep seeing the world thru a grown up's eyes. Although I have two under 11's I can't seem to get down to their level.  The 6 year old loves making pictures with Scratch, so I guess i've just got to nudge him to make them do something with animation!! 

From the RPi Manual I found an organisation over here in UK, that is promoting computers in schools, so will keep an eye on what they can offer too.

Thanks for all you guys and all your guidance.

Shutz.

Hi from Australia,

I got into programming using Alice which is just like Scratch then moved to Java and it was a big jump, looking back I think python would have been a great in between step.

Anyway, I learnt python using "Learn python the hard way" which was one of the best books/tutorials (free) I have ever used. It's aimed at people who have never programmed before but at adults. It has 53 exercises which progress really well and have 'homework'. So if you want to teach python I would recommend you learn through this, then translate the lessons down to a childs level

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

Long story short: Scratch->Python->C good transition from young to older

Cheers,

Dan.