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Teaching Kids to Program

Stefan Tilkov,

An excellent discussion started in the comments of Don Box’s post. I’ve been thinking about the right way to teach my kids (well, my son at least, for the girl it may be a little early) to program without spoiling the fun of it. A few of the comments pointed to ToonTalk, which seems to be very interesting.

On April 6, 2005 9:58 PM, Jonah Stagner said:

My team is developing a new language and IDE just for the purpose of teaching children to program.

The language is visually similar to BASIC, so it’s easy for programming parents and non-programming kids to read and learn, but has some very important differences.

One way that this product is targeted at kids is by making it easy for them to get visual results without having to learn how to create a window, a graphics device, etc.

It supports typed variables, decisions with if-then-else, loops, methods, functions, structures, arrays, and other important basic programming concepts.

It’s not complete, being at Technological Preview stage, and development is still ocurring on this product.

We would love it if people would give it a look-see and maybe provide feedback, especially those in the development community.

Obviously, we hope that you love it, but if you don’t we’d really like to know why.

You can find out more about it at: http://www.ms-inc.net/kpl.aspx