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From: thom@dewey.soe.Berkeley.EDU (Thom Gillespie)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: Teaching Children about Computers
Message-ID: <903@limbo.Intuitive.Com>
Date: 27 Jun 90 23:43:43 GMT
Sender: taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
Lines: 28
Approved: taylor@Limbo.Intuitive.Com

I once used a program from Mecc to teach pre-schools how to program in
LOGO -- read draw pretty pictures, they weren't ready for list processing, 
they couldn't read.  After about an hour a little 5 year old created a 
program to draw a house and then -- on her own -- figured out that she 
could make another program to call that program and then move the cursor 
and create a village.  I'm sitting there thinking, "this kid is doing 
recursion, do I tell her what she's doing?"  I didn't, I just gave her 
a couple of Hershey's Kisses and told her not to get chocolate all over 
the keyboard.

I've taught pre-schoolers to program in LOGO, I've taught grade school
kids to program in LOGO and Forth to run robots, I've taught jr.  high &
high schoolers to program with TV animation packages, I've taught gifted
and talented kids to program in Pascal, I've taught college aged
kids/adults to program in C, Pascal & BASIC -- I always use graphics and
sound to begin and I always encourage game design for projects.  I've
never had a kid say they wanted to use the computer as a tool, no kids
ever said they wanted to use a word processor first, they want to control 
the machine and that means programming.  Kids live up or down to our 
expectations.

In an ideal world ( with lots of Macs) I'd start everyone with
HyperCard/Talk.  In a less than ideal world I'd start everyone with
LOGO.  Kids learn in spite of us.

Good luck; it should be fun for all.

Thom Gillespie