[CoLoCo] programming for kids

[Richard Guenther]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Andrew <keen101 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I found this neat greenfoot program today....


Greenfoot is well made.  It's a newer form of BlueJ, which is an IDE for
learning Java.  It runs great on Ubuntu, as does BlueJ.  If you go with
Greenfoot, check out the Greenfoot gallery, where many users post the source
code for their games:

http://greenfootgallery.org/

On some of the other alternatives:

1.  Scratch is aimed at grade school students.  It has a click and drag
interface and it's quite cute.  MIT has a version especially for Ubuntu,
with an installer, and it works great:

http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Linux_installer

2.  Alice will be coming out with their 3.0 version soon.  The core team at
Carnegie Mellon is very Linux-friendly, but you may have graphics card
issues with the 3D models.  Alice is also click and drag, although the 3.0
version will include the EA characters from SIMS 2 and will have a text
editor built in.  (It's Java code, btw.)

3.  Don't overlook Robocode.  It can be very addictive and also is 100%
Java, so it runs fine on almost anything.  It has a built in editor and
sample robots to learn from.  If I had more time.... anyway:

http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

4.  Python is the best choice for learning right now, IMO.  Pair it up with
PyGame and you have a great environment for making games and also
non-games.  One of my students wrote some proxy server software using
Pygame.... :-)

Richard Guenther
Math and Computer Science
Skyline High School
Longmont, CO
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