6085 comments
2357 subscribers
6224 on Twitter
Subscribe! Feed reader E-mail

Programming for kids

On the Kagay-anon Linux Users Group mailing list:

we will just help kids learn the basics of programming,
logic formulation, flowcharting and the most important is their typing
speed till they will reach 105 wpm.

Here’s what I think about typing:

I find that as long as they can type without thinking about typing,
they’re fine. Get them to touch-type and they’ll be okay even if they
type slowly. The difference is that if you can’t touch-type, you’ll be
looking at the keyboard, and thus not looking at the structure of your
code. If you can touch-type, then even if you type slowly, you’re
still thinking about your code…

and about kids and programming:

What you really need to do is teach the kids to have _fun._
Show them that, and they’ll learn whatever else they need to.

One of my favorite quotes is:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to
collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach
them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Go back and think about what you found fun. What made you fall in love
with computers? What was your passion?

I loved being able to explore. I loved being able to get the computer
to do what I wanted it to, even if it was such a simple thing. And
later on, when I discovered open source development, I loved being
able to make a difference in other people’s lives – even if it was
just a very little difference… =)

Give kids inspiration by showing them what they can do. Give them time
to play, to explore. Give them hints, not instructions. Help them
discover. Let them own their work, let them feel that it is theirs.
Don’t make it a typing exercise. Make it fun. Make it interesting.
Make it play.

On Technorati:

E-Mail from edgardo bangga

Random Japanese sentence: 猫がソファの上に寝ている。 A cat is lying on the sofa.

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/3549

On This Day...

  • 2012: Thinking about the next mini-experiment — The consulting engagement I’m working on is great. It takes advantage of a hard-to-find combination of different skills and experiences, [...]
  • 2011: Learning from Mr. Collins: Practice, conversation, and what to do when someone says something mean — "You judge very properly," said Mr. Bennet, "and it is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering [...]
  • 2010: Travel kaizen and the meaning of life — What do I want to do with my life? Is it worth the trade-offs? How can I make it more [...]
  • 2008: Emacs Gnus: Organize Your Mail — People handle large volumes of mail in different ways. Keeping everything in one mailbox can quickly become unmanageable because messages you need [...]
  • 2008: Too much time on her hands — “Where do you find the time to do that?” That’s what I often hear from people when I talk about [...]
  • 2008: Emacs Gnus: Searching Mail — There are several ways to find messages in Emacs. From the summary buffer, you can use / o (gnus-summary-insert-old-articles) to display all [...]
  • 2007: Plodding away on my thesis — So I’m transcribing the interviews of the usability study. It’s nice hearing the good things again, but I’m seriously thinking that [...]
  • 2006: Another aspect of what I want to do — From netsquared comment: Although I’ve studied the material provided here, what I would really like is to be able to hire [...]
  • 2006: Social media for social change — This is one of the reasons I love technology. On Technorati: social, web2.0 Random Japanese sentence: ある日、彼女はペットの猫がほしいと私に知らせました。 One day, she told me that [...]
  • 2006: Yesterday was a hot chocolate day — The hot chocolate at Linux Caffe (Grace and Harbord Sts.) never fails to perk me up. Yesterday was no exception even though [...]
  • 2006: First baseball game — I watched my very first baseball game last night, thanks to Graduate House Council’s awesomely discounted $5 field-level seats (face price: $34.50, [...]
  • 2006: Congrats to Von Totanes! — Von Totanes has just received his Canadian visa, and will be starting his PhD in information studies Really Soon. Hooray [...]
  • 2006: Oatmeal hacking — One of the nice things about knowing geeks is that they often have another geek specialty. For example, Paul Lussier [...]
  • 2006: My mom reads my blog — My mom reads my blog, and that’s absolutely terrific. =) I love hearing her insights into the things I’m trying to [...]
  • 2006: Old friends and familiar strangers — I don’t know why so many people read about the cooking misadventures and existential crises of this 22-year-old girl, but I [...]
  • 2006: Downtime — As guilty as I feel about taking another day off, unavoidable personal circumstances have come up, and a little bit of [...]
  • 2006: I’m sorry! — I screwed up, and I feel terrible. I hate being virtual… Random Japanese sentence: 猫は夜行性の動物だ。 Cats are active at night.
  • 2006: Being a girl — Tara Hunt knows what it’s like to fade into the background if one has a partner in crime. I don’t really have [...]
  • 2006: Why blogging is cool — I hear this story again and again, in different words. This is one of the reasons why blogging is so [...]
  • 2004: Double Room: prose poetry and short fiction — Double Room: prose poetry and short fiction — http://www.webdelsol.com/Double_Room/
  • 2004: Indexer for planner notes — Just realized that planner-search-notes with a match-all will do perfectly well. I don’t have to do this yet, then. =) WearableMemoryAugmentation
  • 2004: dabbrev-hover — dabbrev-hover http://gnufans.net/~deego Tooltip-show the next completion. Hmm, that’s nice. E-Mail from D. Goel
  • 2004: Musical letters — Musical letters — http://www.ma.utexas.edu/~jcorneli/a/elisp/musical-letters.el Joe Corneli’s written an interface to fluidsynth driven by Emacs typing. Sounds like the sort of multimedia stuff [...]
  • 2004: Japanese for nerds — Japanese for nerds — http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/26/175722/727
  • 2004: BlueJ wiki — http://wiki.bluej.org E-Mail from Davin McCall
  • 2004: w000t! Got perfect on my general GRE! — Got 800 on both the verbal and quantitative sections of the general GRE test. Whee!
  • 2003: Xemacs text menus? — Does XEmacs even have text menu support? I’m looking for something like tmm.
  • 2003: message-sent-hook — Strange, the hook is locally set to (gnus-agent-possibly-do-gcc t), but message-to-planner gets called.
  • 2003: pda dev class — I need to look into dualbooting iPAQs so that Stanley and I can share the iPAQs. We’ll need high-capacity CompactFlash [...]
  • 2003: Message to planner — (defun message-to-planner () "Logs this message to the News and Mail section of today's planner file." (save-window-excursion [...]
  • 2003: Logging gnus messages — (defun message-to-diary () (make-diary-entry (concat (calendar-date-string (calendar-current-date) t) (if (message-fetch-field "newsgroups") [...]
  • 2003: Constructivism — - problem-based learning - case-based learning - goal-based scenarios CAI: Output should be a constructivist module
  • 2003: Stuff I need to take care of — - Mindstorms? Mostly Stanley - Alternative user interfaces: order my keyboards and HMDs, and think of good research projects Oooh! DoubleTalk speech [...]
  • 2003: Codestriker debs — Codestriker is a web-based collaborative code review tool. deb http://nthomas.free.fr/debian sid main deb-src http://nthomas.free.fr/debian sid main
  • 2003: Need to make a list of things I’d like — - Twiddler - other keyboards - head-mounted device
  • 2003: Debian-related HOWTOs — http://lyre.mit.edu/~powell/debian-howto/
  • 2003: List of UML products — http://www.objectsbydesign.com/tools/umltools_byPlatform.html
  • 2003: Pen tablet that can run Linux — Someone on PLUG said that the Fujitsu Stylistic 1000 is a “dirt-cheap” pen tablet that can run Linux, and that too [...]
  • 2003: CS161 William — CS161 CS becomes 162, which is a combination of CS161 and systems programming. Change of textbook back to Tanenbaum. Lab class. CS162a&b. [...]

Get the highlights as a PDF!

Stories from my Twenties: Highlights from a Decade of Blogging