[neilxdsouza]

I have a take on this one. Im single right now, but I love programming and wonder how i'd like to pass my trade information to my kids (when I get married and have a family). I see programming at some level in the future as essential - like playing football (or basketball) or bicycling etc. For example, I'm guessing almost every youth will be able to use markdown on a blog post by 2040 or some HTML.

First of all today many people see programming as a career. I think by 2040, every kid will be a programmer at some level. I'm assuming by then, a youth then will need to know how to program to survive - it will be a basic elementary skill like we learn in school. So a school curriculum could be something like: draw a face using ascii characters on the screen using print statements in say grade 5. Use a for loop in grade 6. Function call in grade 7. Recursive functions in grade 8. Grade 9 - Advanced programming - introduction to the x86 CPU (optional - you can drop computers and take some other subject if you want). Grade 10 - put the CPU into 32 bit mode with 5 page tables. Do you think these things are very hard for these age level? I don't think so.

What if by then - kids played football/or hockey on some days of the week and got together with friends and built a website on another day and played with Lego on yet another? I think by the time you reached college then, and you had Physics as a subject, you would probably write a program to simulate 3 billiard balls on a table and someone strikes them with a 4th. Or implementing a problem solver applying Kirchoff's laws to circuits using Graphs traversal algorithms which she learned somewhere around high school. Today I think people see careers in the IT industry as an end, in 2040 I think Programming will be a means to an end - they will permeate every branch of study you are dealing with - be a Psychology, or Physics or Maths or anything else - creating a website will be normal.

A lot of people are saying IT skills may not be necessary because your child won't work in IT; I think basic IT and programming skills will help people in the next generation understand and integrate in the world around them - so for me programming could be right alongside Math that you learn in high school (how many people use factorization of polynomials in day to day life (which we learned in school)? )

So I think you are right about teaching your kids some basic programming.

I'm just wondering what is it that I had difficulties with/enjoyed: 1) Typing - throw out the QWERTY keyboard and start your child on a Dvorak keyboard from day one - and do typing lessons with her 2) I remember in basic you had screen 2 - 640x480 mode graphics. You could do some great drawing stuff with that - like a circle in a for loop whose radius and origin kept changing with each iteration. 3) Writing PC boot code as more advanced stuff (like when your child reaches high school and still wants to learn more other wise you can stop at recursion and let her take it forward from there)