[kenrikm]

I would recommend not trying to teach for loops etc... Show them how to tie a function to an image to make it move across the screen as a building block to make a game and they will find it interesting. Maybe start with flash/actionscript so they can see (click image > write code for image > image does stuff)

[rytis]

unfortunately in the selection that I have of 8 (mine), 9 (not mine) and 10 (mine) none are bright enough to grasp the concept of a 'sprite' yet, i'm not even talking about relating code to that sprite. flash/actionscript? ho many steps are there between typing something and actually getting stuff appear on the screen? I've written 2-3 simple swf's, and it caused my head to spin... you think a kid could do it? on their own?...

friend of mine ('owner' of the 9yo), tried some sort of python environment which was supposed to do just that (i think it's this: http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/en/rur.htm, but not sure), but failed - quite limited in what it does, or get way too complicated if you want to tweak something.

so the whole experiment was a flop really...

[kenrikm]

Hmm true, I always considered Flash/Actionscript to be dead simple (Drag image to the view => click on it and add code to make it do stuff) However maybe it's because I grew up loading 5.5inch floppys in a computer without a hard drive that only ran DOS. This is actually something I've been thinking about lately since my son is now 4 months old and I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to teach him this stuff, I grew up evolving with the technology so a terminal window does not feel foreign to me. How do you start from scratch in the age of iPads etc.. ?

[gaius]

I am pretty sure when I was 10, it was normal for a kid to know what a sprite was (indeed the finer points of what and how your computer did sprites was playground argument stuff). Most people had at least had an attempt at creating their own game or demo. Kids these days only want to use computers.

[rytis]

yes, precisely. they want to use it to create other things. drawing, writing, presentations - they find it interesting. programming? not so. why? i don't know. i tend to think it's the tools, or the complexity of it all. on the second though, i think they all got too used to the instant gratification, in other words, the more time it takes to get the result, the less interesting/inspiring it becomes. and it kind of brings us back to the first point - tools are too complicated... :)