Programming &stuff

Have started teaching Aasim Logo programming about a week ago, we started with KTurtle, Aasim also liked the very nice KDE interface but to my dismay it has a bug in displaying the correct line numbers when errors occur. While this is OK of now when I can tell Aasim which line he went wrong – it will soon hamper his experimentation besides it does not have bindings to any toolkit which means no Windowed application programming which he hopes to do.

Searching around I found MSWLogo and the more popular and commercial MicroWorlds EX. However I was horrified by the WYSIWYG style of MicroWorlds (it seems to be modeled after some M$ IDE ) and quickly rejected it.

So for now it will be MSWLogo which even though very plain looking fits the bill perfectly, best of all there is a wonderful free book called The Great Logo Adventure aimed at children which uses MSWLogo as the base.

Lets see how long Aasim’s interest lasts – more than teaching programming the idea is to give him logical and problem solving skill, but I do hope that he keeps at it and perhaps takes up C (with or without ++) in near future.

I guess I will have to learn a bit of teaching skills from his tabla teacher who has managed to enchant him into the world of music.

In the daily drudgery department – the painting of walls etc at home has been completed as has been the construction of my Studio, will have the electric wiring and the backdrop system in place the coming week. Hopefully next Sunday I will be able to have a shoot there.

  • I suggest you read Mindstorms and the Children’s machine, both by Seymour Papert – the guy who created logo. Also, I found ucblogo to be quite good. No IDE.

    • Thanks for the heads up on the books will definitely look them up

  • wow!

    I am hearing about logo after around 15 years. It was the first language i ever learnt. Guess it was 4th standard when i was 10 years old :). And it was on a PC XT i think or maybe the BBC computer.. cant really remember.

  • Smalltalk…

    I would suggest that you start him off on something more matured.
    Expose him to Smalltalk, especially Squeak (https://www.squeak.org/).
    It was designed for the kind of thing you are attempting to achieve.
    Also check out https://www.squeakcentral.org/
    I would recommend that you order the DVD that they have out there.

    • Re: Smalltalk…

      Perhaps you do not know that my son is 7. I spent about 20 min on the above two sites tying to get a basic Hello World equivalent without any success.

      I am sorry – the ceiling for Squeak might be high enough BUT surely the floo is not low enough.

      • Re: Smalltalk…

        I know that your son is quite small, didn’t know his exact age though.

        Tools evolve over time.
        Logo was good in its time, Smalltalk evolved out of it based on a need to deliver something better.

        Don’t jump directly into teaching your kid to program, let him learn it on his own.
        For that the system has to be highly interactive and engaging.
        That is something only Squeak can offer.

        I would suggest that you purchase the DVD of theirs, its excellent stuff.

        • Re: Smalltalk…

          Heh! I made it quite clear that I do not want programming M$ style – trial and error OR WYSIWYG IDEs 🙂

          Like I said I wanted a language with a very low floor – something which a 7 year old can write and comprehend immediately like

          REPEAT 4 [FORWARD 100 RIGHT 90]

          I can ask him to do this using paper and pencil. I can evolve games around it. I can tell him that the statements which he wrote are called a program. He is learning to program knowing that he is learning to program – that is the attraction. He has enough interactive softwares and can handle computers well enough and has been doing it to the point of ennui

          Programming is the next level – Dragging UI components and writing events is not he wants to do – that is as boring as creating a calendar using Pokemon Printshop or whatever.