Most adults are intimidated by programming. A lot of them have never actually seen the code of a computer program and they probably imagine it to be some kind of esoteric mumbo-jumbo. Even those who actually see a piece of code seem quite baffled by it. When I ask other adults working at my school if they would like me to teach them some programming, they look at me as if I was out of my mind. They all assume it is difficult and way beyond their level of expertise.
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Robot Attack! (Photo credit: Dan Coulter)
Kids, however, are a different story. I’m talking about 7-year-olds. Kids who can barely write. Kids who like to make drawings of their dogs and then add wings on them. These kids, unlike the adults, are not only not intimidated, but dive into programming like kamikazes, fearless, determined, unaware of all the prejudices most adults have. I got my kids to program with very little effort in the course of 3 45-minute sessions. This is how I did it. I started by playing a game. I spread some beads on the ground and told them one of them was a robot. The robot wasn’t really smart so it could only understand very simple instructions, like “turn left” or “forward 3 steps.” The goal was to get as many beads as possible, but they had to write what the robot had to do in advance. Kids love games and playing the robot, so that went well. It introduced them to two important concepts: firstly, to the fact that computers only do exactly what you tell them and nothing else. That computers, unlike children, can’t more or less understand what you mean. Secondly, to sequential batches of instructions and to the limited lexicon of computer-human interactions.
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English: Screenshot of the RoboMind educational programming environment (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The next step was playing a computer game. I used light-bot, in which you control a little robot using symbols. It is exactly like programming: the only difference is you use pictures instead of words. It even allows you to use functions and recursion. There are two versions of light-bot: the first one is great as an introduction. In the second one recursion plays a bigger role and there’s the option of creating your own levels. Needless to say, light-bot was even a bigger success than the previous game, since one thing kids love more than games is computer games. It was so successful that many of the kids actually started to play it at home, therefore learning more program than I could ever have taught them, on their own. Some of them managed to finish the game and started creating levels for their classmates.
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English: RoboMind logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The last step was using robomind. It is a program which is very similar to the mythical win logo from the 90s, where students controlled a little turtle by typing commands in a console. In robomind you control some kind of robotic vehicle which can observe its surroundings, move around and paint. The language is quite powerful and it includes the possibility of using loops, as well as if/then statements, which makes it straightforward to program your robot so it finds its way out of a maze, for example. Students also loved robomind, even though it involved typing, because they had already become familiar with the concepts needed for programming with the previous experiences. My next step will be to introduce MIT Scratch, a programming language which allows students to create videogames and animations. My pupils are, of course, very excited about it. I’ll let you know how it goes.
