Need advice about teaching programming to children

I am a Delphi programmer.  I have start to taught programming to 4 grade
elementary student using Scratch for about 1 month. I  have  seen that  
the programming concept can be understood  easily by the student.

I have learned "squeak learn programming with robot" . Currently, I am
learning smalltalk. I found that smalltalk is really powerful
programming environment. I hope I can eventually teach children real
programming. But I found that GUI programming like Delphi is much
simpler in the term of GUI.
 
I believe elementary student can do programming like adult if we have a
good method to teach them programming skill. (Please advice me if I am
wrong).
I need advise to how I should proceed my programming class. I have some
scenario
Scratch --> Etoys--> BotsInc. --> smalltalk or
Scratch --> BotsInc --> smalltalk  or
Etoys --> BotsInc. --> Smalltalk   or
Scratch --> Lazarus (Delphi like Open source).

thanks.




 


_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

nigen wrote: This is a little hard to answer because one does not exclude the other.
You can do very advanced projects in both Etoys and Scratch that are on
'Computer Science' level.
Or you can go trough different languages and approaches but you will
spend time relearning the same skill in different environments.
I can see benefits in both approaches.
Karl


_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

Hi --

The biggest difference between elementary school children - and teens
and adults - is in their ability to make plans and carry them out --
quite a bit of this seems to be developmental and thus somewhat
related to age (where ages 11-13 are a pivot point between one kind
of planning and more elaborate plans). A second developmental
difference is in how certain kinds of abstractions can be learned and
used -- one could easily divide up the elementary years into 3 or 4
categories based on the kinds of abstractions and the forms for them.
Some of these results have been used in both Scratch and Etoys to
achieve a better cognitive fit.

The most important questions for you to ask yourself have to do with
your ultimate goals for teaching programming to children. Programming
can be a route towards learning lots of powerful ideas and thinking
processes, but it is not sufficient all by itself (the class of
programmers today doesn't appear to be necessarily very enlightened
or knowledgeable about much of anything by virtue of learning to
program). So you need some goals, and then some ways to possibly use
programming to help children learn what you hope.

Cheers,

Alan

At 09:07 PM 11/22/2007, nigen wrote:

_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

Thanks Alan,

I am a beginner in education. I am really need to learn a lot. I have
also learned the powerful ideas book. It is really inspiring.

I emphasize student creativity during my classes. I hope the children
can use programming skill to express their creativity.  Meanwhile, The
skill of doing Animation, presentation, simulation and game programming
will be the objective of my class.

Regards,
 Nigen

Alan Kay wrote:

_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland