What features are important in a programming language for young beginners?

Posted by NoMoreZealots on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by NoMoreZealots
Published on 2010-03-25T19:10:01Z Indexed on 2010/03/25 22:03 UTC
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programming

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teaching

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language-features

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beginners

I was talking with some of the mentors in a local robotics competition for 7th and 8th level kids. The robot was using PBASIC and the parallax Basic Stamp. One of the major issues was this was short term project that required building the robot, teaching them to program in PBASIC and having them program the robot. All in only 2 hours or so a week over a couple months. PBASIC is kinda nice in that it has built in features to do everything, but information overload is possible to due this.

My thought are simplicity is key.

When you have kids struggling to grasp:

if X>10 then <DOSOMETHING>

There is not much point in throwing "proper" object oriented programming at them.

What are the essentials needed to foster an interest in programming?

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