Suitable environment for a 7 year old [closed]

Answer 1

Microsoft has a couple of interesting efforts that seems a nice fit:

• popfly: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950523.aspx --- "Popfly includes a simple way to create and share games with your friends. Choose from a variety of built-in templates or start from scratch to create a side scrolling game, a 2D shoot-em-up, or a host of others. And best of all, you can get started without writing a line of code" ... I think it can really help being motivated :)

  • smallbasic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx --- supposed to be simplified but having intellisense+.net framework support (the short description is too marketing like, so I didn't paste it :P)

Answer 2

I'd say use visual basic, or something similar where you don't have to worry about syntax, curly braces, etc as much. I was programming at 7, but it was in LOGO and C64 Basic. I HATED LOGO ... it was so frustrating to me that one of the "big" things you could do was move around a stupid turtle. However, C64 Basic (to me) was great ... once I had that down (a couple years) I was psyched to learn C and even C64 assembler.

Answer 3

Scheme is nice and syntactically similar to Logo, in the respects of simplicity. Also Scheme offers a very intuitive way of understanding recursion and picking up these type of fundamental concepts in computer science that early on is nothing but good with more good.

UCB Scheme also offers a lot of built in functionality for manipulating sentences, which may make more sense to a 7 year old than constructing polygons and solving number puzzles (not to say that the sky's the limit!).

Answer 4

Have him check out http://scratch.mit.edu. My seven year old is learning this as we type...

Answer 5

I strongly disagree with the people who say seven year olds would have a hard time learning new syntax. This is completely backwards. Try teaching pig latin to a seven year old and to a thirty something non-native English speaker. Or try traveling in a foreign country with your kids. See who can chat fluently with the natives after a month (hint: it probably won't be you).

Kids pick up on arbitrary linguistic conventions much faster than us gray hairs do.

Answer 6

Look no further, there's actually an entire learning platform/ OS designed for this very purpose: Sugar.

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) operating system called Sugar is now available to the general public and you can run it as a VM within all major operating systems such as Mac, Windows and Linux.

Download a copy at Sugar Labs.

One interesting activity included is called TurtleArt, a souped up 21st century version of Logo. Also has a kid friendly version of a Python IDE called Pippy. It actually teaches kids Python!

See TurtleArt and Pippy and the other activities found in Sugar.

Alan Kay was behind some of the novel concepts in Sugar OS which is actually a modern incarnation of his visionary DynaBook. Even as an adult (who's an engineer), I find it fun to play with.

And if you love Sugar as a VM, you can even buy the hardware and at the same time help a poor kid somewhere else in the world.

Engadget explains : OLPC XO Buy-One, Give-One program underway

As a bonus to us adults, Sugar is derived from Fedora. So it's a real and complete Linux based OS. Should be fun to hack. ;-)