Hitesh Sarda » Kids

Programming for kids

Hitesh — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:09:35 +0000

We spent the long Easter weekend, lazing happily indoors since the weather did not permit going out. I wondered if the time could have been spent better, and started researching if my older daughter is old enough to start programming.

Little background

My daughter will soon be six and she can use the computer very well for the usual tasks and I think she is a bit ahead of the curve, but that might just be a father speaking

The big bottleneck, I see, is her poor English skills. English not being our native tongue and she going to a German kindergarten, has limited her knowledge of English to a few words and phrases. Thus reading and writing code is going to be a challenge.

Visual programming

Given the language ‘handicap’, I started looking out for what the best way to visually teach programming, which does not involve much reading and writing. A little research resulted in 3 options, 2 of which are old and I had come across and one that is pretty new.

Alice

Alice is project from Carnegie Mellon University, with a lot of industry backing. It is quite mature, but does not seem to be actively developed. for example Alice 3.0 is under development for over 4 years and still in a beta state. The recommended documentation is to buy the ‘Learning to Program with Alice’ book.

In addition, it is targeted towards high school students, although and interesting, but unsupported side project, Storytelling Alice is targeted towards younger children.

For now, I have decided to give it a slip and will revisit once Alice 3.0 is more stable.

Scratch

Scratch is a project from MIT. It has a smaller learning curve, but is more limited compared to Alice. I think it only supports 2D compared to 3D support from Alice. This makes it more approachable for younger kids. In addition there are tons of lesson plans, documentation and samples available. Scratch has built-in sharing and there are literally a million user submitted projects.

All in all, I think Scratch will be a good starting point for my daughter. But, there’s more

Kodu

The latest entrant on the scene is Kodu, a Microsoft Research project. originally written for Xbox as a meta game (a game builder), a technical preview for PC has recently being released. It is a very visually engaging and has a polished feel to it. Given that it is a fairly new project, the documentation is lacking, save for the in game help and sample, and a few blog posts. Let’s see how it goes. There is always Scratch to fall back on.

And

Oh yes, there are a few more options, especially Logo and Lego Mindstorms NXT.

Kid Project: Making paper

Hitesh — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:22:29 +0000

I was trying to explain paper-recycling to my daughter, then thought it is best we do it together. Thus came about a weekend project to make paper from waste papers. Although the end result was not that great, I think she understood the concepts.

She was super excited and did most of the steps herself, including taking the pictures.

Here is a pictorial guide to making your own ‘hand-made’ paper.

Teaching kids (& adults) about climate

Hitesh — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:51:57 +0000

With Copenhagen behind us, it makes me wonder is there something we as individuals do to help the climate? On one such thought tangent I wondered if it possible to teach kids about climate using a simulation game like Civilisation? On cursory search I could not find anything that could entertain and educate kids.

What would it be?

An empire building game that needs to balance technology, way of life and climate to achieve sustainable conditions. The players will need to move from stone age to iron age to industrial age to knowledge age. All this is well covered by games in the Civilisation series. The difference is, to advance in the technology tree, they will need to consume resources and they need to understand that resources are limited and that consuming them is not without consequences.

Learning

A game that will show the interdependence of several factors like:

Exploitation of natural resources (wood, coal, oil, gold, diamonds, animals, fishes etc) for technical progress and their costs in terms of environmental impact
The long term implication of the such impact
Investing in technology to achieve sustainable development
Also the flip side of not consuming natural resources and it impact on growth and empire building
The need to consume resources to ‘unlock’ next levels of technical innovation
Trading of resources amongst empires which have surplus of something
I would probably underplay the option of war and more of foreign trade as a means to acquire scarce resources.

What next?

I am not a game developer so wouldn’t know how to get about doing it. But may be some like minded people will come together and look at it. Maybe Freeciv can provide a starting point. Maybe it even becomes successful and makes some money for the creators.

Kids say the darndest things

Hitesh — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:11:16 +0000

This is what my daughter has to say about my home computers:

Papa, ever since you made the computer a laptop, it misbehaves and crashes. Please make it a computer again!

Read computer = Ubuntu and laptop = Windows. My desktop ran Ubuntu for a long time until I installed Win7 on it. My laptop always had WinXP as shipped by the manufacturer. My daughter prefers Ubuntu to Windows, looks like I am raising a Linux fangirl

I wonder if Scott Hanselman will publish this on http://www.overheardathome.com