Programmer Musings

Programming for/by Kids: a Followup

At the beginning of last year, I wrote Programming for/by Kids talking about my experience getting my young son programming using the Scratch language. Shortly after I wrote that piece, he lost interest and stopped. As usual, something else caught his attention and he was off working on that. When I noticed that he wasn't talking about wanting to program any more, I figured that he had worn out his desire to program and that would be it. I was a little disappointed, but he has his own interests.

Fast forward a little over a year and he is assigned a project in school to do a report on a book. From what he says, the teacher has suggested that the kids do PowerPoint presentations for their reports. (Fifth-graders doing PowerPoint, the world is changing...) My son decides that he wants to do something a bit more entertaining than a basic slide presentation. So, he fires up the Scratch environment and starts building a little movie for his report. He asked for a little help on a few things, but mostly works at it steadily for several days on his own.

As the project nears completion, we discussed the problem that his teacher might not be willing (or able) to install the Scratch environment to run his movie. With a moment's thought, he decides to get his digital camera and record a video of the movie playing on his screen. He put both the Scratch program and the video on a thumb drive and brought them to school. His report was a success.
Even though I had thought he lost all interest in programming, he had actually learned what he wanted and kept those skills for later use. Unlike this old programmer, he was interested in programming for the end product and not the process.

If any of you out there decide to try to teach programming to kids, you might want to watch for a completely different mindset than we had when we were learning. Given that computers are everywhere in kids lives today (their phones have more power than the first computers I programmed), they probably see programming very differently than we do.