<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif">We were just talking in the office about 'C++ for Kids'. (No opinion yet).<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif">Teaching the command line is important: cd and ls, and my then 7 year old picked up the basics of vi no problem.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif">Even though Perl is not as trendy right now, I think it is a fantastic language to start with. Don't need Python's half-assed object oriented notation, when you don't want to be teaching object oriented programming yet.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif">The natural language roots, simple commands and straightforward procedural program are benefits of Perl.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif">print "Johnny " x 30</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif">Where, "johnny" is your kid's name is about as easy as it gets</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif">C++ also has an abstraction difficult to deal with at the beginning "What's #include <iostream>?". You have to explain libraries, essentially, and then functions (int main...). It's not bad to start with the fundamentals, but starting with abstract concepts may lead to waning interests the younger you go.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif">My son wanted to program a video game, so we did a text-based Perl program that did "Choose your character; get random numbers to hit and be hit and subtract hit points and see who dies first" program. That was very easy and quick in Perl and I got a "cool" and an "I-want-to-do-more".</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial black,sans-serif"><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Regards,<br>Sean<br><br><div>Sean Blanton</div><div><a href="mailto:sean@blanton.com" target="_blank">sean@blanton.com</a></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 11:12 AM, Jim Thomason <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jim@jimandkoka.com" target="_blank">jim@jimandkoka.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">To be brutally honest, Perl just ain't cool like it used to be any more. So most of the "teach kids to code" things out there are probably going to be in another language - probably python, which seems to be the dominant thing nowadays. Javascript to a lesser extent.<div><br></div><div>I think your best course of action would probably be to start with one of those courses as a framework, and just port it to use Perl as the language instead.</div><div><br></div><div>That way, you're not creating a curriculum from scratch and are basing it off of something existing without trying to guess a good pace to move at.</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div class="h5">On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 10:43 AM, Richard Reina <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gatorreina@gmail.com" target="_blank">gatorreina@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br></div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div class="h5"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div>I have a 10 year old and an 11 year old. I would like them to learn a little perl and am trying to come up with a mini (30 day) perl course designed for them that will make it fun. Something like Randal Schwartz stroll thru perl from his Learning Perl book but eaiser. What I was thinking was something like the following but I run out of ideas after about 3 days. If anyone can help with more days worth of ideas I would be grateful to here your suggestions.<br><br></div><div>Thanks<br></div><div><br></div>Day 1: Create a Hello World script.<br></div>Day 2: Make hello world script ask for users name capture it and respond "Please to meet you "user".<br></div>Day 3: Ask user if they wan't to know the date and time and give it to them if they type "y".<br></div>Day 4: <br></div>Day 5 ....<br></div>
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