Suitable environment for a 7 year old [closed]

Answer 1

Might as well throw out Lego™ Mindstorms™ as a possibility. It uses a graphical programming language based on LabView.

Answer 2

Two thoughts come to mind:

• My 3 year old son loves playing World of Goo with me. He can't solve problems yet, but I can see he is soaking up loads of information.
• Have a go with Alice. My son is too young to try this, but once he is older we'll give it a go if he is keen. FWIW I learnt about this program after watching The Last Lecuture by Randy Pausch (R.I.P)

Answer 3

You could also use Commodore 64 emulator. It start's right from BASIC.

Answer 4

Tell him about parsers. You just need to add context and reasoning to why things exist. The curly braces are so that the machine that reads the code knows where things start and stop.

I find that most people including children pick up things easily as long as you explain the purpose of them. This is why school was a terrible failure for me, no-one ever explaining the point of learning half the stuff.

Answer 5

There is actually a browser-based Logo interpreter in Javascript.

http://logo.twentygototen.org/

Answer 6

Developmentally, a seven year-old is unlikely to grasp the basics of syntax even in their spoken language.

Whatever language or environment you use, I would recommend focusing on the idea of programming as play rather than the ability to write actual programs. Towards this end, something you can run from a command line and see immediate results, like Python or, for a more graphical experience, Silverlight, would probably be best.