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programming for children

Radovan Garabik garabik at melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk.spam
Tue Feb 1 13:49:57 EST 2000 
Fritz Heinrichmeyer <fritz.heinrichmeyer at fernuni-hagen.de> wrote:
 : My son is 11 years and wants to learn programming. He heared about java at
 : school (cool like nike or adidas ...) but in my opinion this is very hard
 : stuff for a beginner to bring anything to play.

 : I thought of a nice python environment under windows ... It would be best to
 : have german documentation too.

 : What do you think?

do you know about KAREL? it is a programming language designed 
for children. You are in control of a robot in a room, there are
walls, bricks etc and you program the robot with commands like
MOVE, TURN LEFT, DROP BRICK, PICK UP BRICK, the language
has conditions (IF WALL, IF NOT WALL, IF BRICK, WHILE NOT WALL),
can define it's own procedures etc...
(I am loosely translating the commands from slovak equvalent I vaguealy
remember from the time I saw KAREL)
This is probably aimed at a bit younger children though.

There are implementation for some 8-bit computers, as well as for win3.1,
even in 3D graphics 

I thought about writting KAREL in python, with modified python-like syntax,
it's own editor etc... but due to lack of time I probably will not do it
(anytime soon).
However, just making a few functions, displaying via tkinter and 
using standard python shell as a command line should be easy to write
(and maybe once I'll do it). And it would still be standard python
(definitely an advantage :-)).

Just an idea...


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