On 09/23/2010 09:58 AM, Scott Morrow wrote:
Hello Monte,
<snip>
- Starting programming for older kids (9 or 10 year olds).
It sounds like the age of children you are looking at may be a challenging
group if writing code is the goal. I teach 8 and 9 year olds and my experience
teaching them HyperCard (and last year, revMedia) is that (no matter how hard I
wish it to be different) very few are developmentally ready to program. A
simple PowerPoint type interface and/or templates that they can customize is
more appropriate with the kiddos I work with. A few of the more gifted 9 year
olds can get their head around variables and if-then branching but my
experience (and the general consensus of folks I spoke to at a few RevCons) was
that 10 or 11 year olds were usually better able to think at that level of
abstraction... On the other hand, it hasn't stopped me from exposing kids to
scripting in order to see who gets a light in their eyes! Let us know what you
end up doing. I'm certain I'm not alone in wanting to know what someone of
your skill will end up contributing inside a school setting.
Now this is really very interesting.
I put some plastic cups on the table and move beans around them and call
it a calculator.
The I set up an interface with buttons as per a standard Electronic
calculator;
and a few fields called "cup1", "cup2", "cup3", and so on on RevMedia.
Then get one kid to move beans around the cups and tell the kid at the
computer things like:
"put the beans from cup1 and the beans from cup2 into cup3"
and
"take the same number of beans as are in cup1 out of cup2 and put them
in cup3"
then the kids start writing code "under" the '+','-','/' and '*' buttons
. . .
most of these kids are in the 7 - 10 range.
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