On Dec 1, 2006, at 10:30 AM, Kate Wood wrote: > So... say you were going to teach a child (or several children) of > about ten, reasonable technical aptitude, to program using Perl. How > would you go about it? I'm doing some lessons for my daughter and her > friends for the spring,and need some further input. They're not quite > of an age where handing them the camel book and saying "go for it" is > realistic, but they're pretty self-motivated.
As much as I like Perl, is it really a good first language for anyone, and kids in particular? I seem to remember that there was some good "Python for kids" tutorials out there, as well as Scheme/Logo. Maybe I'm biased because my first exposure to programming was turtle graphics in Logo at about the age you're describing, and I know there are some good modern implementations of turtle / Logo / Scheme for Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. that would be good for kids to learn on. Perl as a first language though seems like a risky idea though, almost along the lines of that old (Knuth?) line about people who learned on Basic being irrepairably damaged programmers :-) -- Chris Devers _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
