My son is going into 7th grade and I'm looking for something productive for him to do over the summer. He's got swim team in the mornings, but during the hot part of the day I'd like to give him something to do inside besides watch TV. Anyway, I don't know if there's anything out there, but I was wondering if there's any software that is geared towards teaching kids a basic understanding of computer programming. When I was his age, I had fun making little programs in BASIC and I thought that some kind of programming might be fun and educational for him as well. It never hurts to start giving him some ideas of what he might do in college.
7th grade is old enough to do real computer programming imo give him a how to make video games for dummies kind of book in visual basic
We've got him beat down pretty well so that he doesn't complain about not watching very much TV and no video games. He gets to play games at his friends' houses, but we don't have any games here. I'll check out the Visual Studio Express. I actually have no idea if there will be any interest on his part, but he's got an open mind and sounds interested. I'll also check out the book store and see if there's anything there that might get him interested.
The thing with programming is that the kid kinda has to want to do it. I think he'll be bored w/ it if he was never interested in that kind of stuff in the beginning.
There's always PASCAL . It's much better than BASIC. In fact, I think a lot of colleges still use PASCAL for beginning language courses...and even weed-out courses. C# would probably be your best bet. Like has been mentioned...get a hold of Visual Studio Express. Intellisense will help him immensely. Start with the typical "Hello World" windows, console, or web app tutorials. At this point, I'm going to recommend he stay away from any Silverlight or Windows Presentation Foundation applications. Those technologies are fairly new. lol
You should check out Alice. It is a 3d modeling environment based on Java designed to teach kids object-oriented language concepts. The project was started by Randy Pausch, who is famous for his presentation for the last lecture series. You can find Alice at http://www.alice.org/
I downloaded Alice today, but haven't got a chance to look at it. I'll have him go through the tutorial and see if it sparks some interest.
You are focusing on programming, but could he also be interested in related tech things like networks or web sites?
when i was in the 7th grade, i was learning html and creating newly updated rosters for nba live on PC back when live was actually a bit good.
i shouldve put this in my post above. Stupid TAB+Enter but i found that photoshop and altering video game files on pc was really fun back when i was in 7th grade. your son might be interested in that.
Are you sure the kid's even interested in programming? When I was in 7th and 8th grade (way back when), my parents dropped me off at Rice University, and I roamed their computer section looking for BASIC programs I could type into my new Apple //e at home. I'd copy them down from books onto notebook paper and bring them home. Come to think of it, Rice used to have some type of "enrichment program" (can't remember the actual name of it) that my parents enrolled me in when I was in 8th grade I think. It was basically lots of kids from around the area just taking courses about various interests. I think it was taught by either TA's from Rice or teachers - I don't recall. I remember there were courses like plate tectonics, physics, etc. Of course this was like 20-25 years ago, so I don't know if it still exists.
firecat, He's too young for Rice Summer School, and too late to enroll this Summer anyhow. If you live in Houston, I recommend emailing <a href="http://compsci.rice.edu/Facultydetail.cfm?riceid=129">Dr. Nguyen</a> at Rice University. He is one of those rare Rice professors whose job is strictly to teach, with no real research responsibilities, beyond his research into how to teach OOP. He teaches first year CompSci. I know him personally, and we've discussed how to get kids interested in OOP concepts. How to make it fun. Maybe he'll have recommendations. Rice recommends learning recursive programming first...Scheme has replaced Lisp as the standard teaching language. There are high schools that teach using Scheme. It's not the language; it's the concepts that matter see this: http://www.schemers.com/ That said, just getting them to do anything is a win. <a href="http://www.rubyinside.com/opinion-taking-ruby-to-the-kids-233.html">Ruby comes to mind.</a> I've also heard some good things about this: http://judo.sourceforge.net/
firecat, there are some great software packages out there to help teach the concepts of programming, and make it more fun for kids. *I see bejezus has already noted this one -- One of the most successful is Alice. Alice is a really neat program that teaches the concepts of programming using a 3D animation environment and drag and drop commands. I know it's becoming pretty popular in some high school programming classes because it helps to teach concepts like object orientation, loops, and so on, but it doesn't require memorizing any program syntax. It's really neat, and I bet your son would like it. Another really neat package is Robocode. When I taught computer science a few years ago, this was pretty big. It's basically a Java library that lets you build your own robots and have them battle eachother. It's pretty neat, and the students really liked it.
Try BlueJ, it's really good for learning entry knowledge about object oriented programming. Not sure if it's for kids, but it's great for beginner.
