I found a board game that teaches you different programming languages.
Looks like at least worth a look see.
Looks like the first of it’s kind as well. Wonder if this will be the Monopoly or Clue of our generation?
Interesting concept. I think it demonstrates program flow pretty well, however there are a few things that bother me a little about it.
- The use of the goto statement. Granted, it’s a legal operation, but I think it’s an operation that needs to be taught with caution.
- They don’t assign the arithmetic operations to a variable. (i.e. x+2). They should have declared a second variable (maybe spaces, or movement) that determined how many spaces the player moved. As is, if you were trying to teach using this game, you’d have to explain that the value of x didn’t change.
Agreed. (Your mention of goto almost made me not even look at the game. :D)
Interesting idea.
It is kind of ironic that the info says it is for 11 years old, but I don’t know children that can program that young. To appreciate a programming language you have to have at least an algebra 1 standing, which is grade 7/8 (14-15 year olds). But it is a cool concept, but only nerds would every play it.
The only reason I wasn’t programming at 11 years of age is because that was in 1972 and there wasn’t a computer handy to program with. Programming isn’t always about number crunching: I knew eight-year-olds who did amazing things with LOGO decades ago, without needing any more math than their addition tables.
Don’t underestimate the innate curiosity of an encouraged child, and don’t label them nerds just because they show an interest in logic and programming.
I was one of them. LOGO was a fun program, I miss those old computers on which I learned to program back in India. We had computers with the huge floppy disks with the programs loaded and I spent hours just playing with LOGO and then Pascal.
I started by programming in C when I was young too. The LEGO RIS 1.5 environment lacked a lot of features, so I used BrickOS.
I started about a week ago… as part of my degree course (ok i did some fake base level code for a fake processor last year bu tthat doesn’t really count.)
Seems to be pretty easy to do and work out so far…
Heh, I started programming on the TI-99/4A back in '83, I was 6 years old. I would copy the source code for an extended BASIC language out of a book that was provided with the machine, and learned to program my first one-armed bandit. From there it’s history…
-Danny