Let’s be honest… learning the basic concepts of computer programming is really hard for most people. Sure, once you’ve put in the hard yards you can create lots of fun and interesting applications, but when you’re learning the basics, such as looping, conditional statements, objects and methods, it can be pretty darn boring (and abstract and demotivating and confusing and … etc.)
Last week, thanks to Jude Cooke and Leigh Blackall, I had a chance to introduce computer programming to a bunch of Year 10 students from Katoomba high. Instead of my normal “robot” introduction (you know, I’m the robot, you’ve gotta give me instructions to pick up stuff), I used a great Open Source (edit: Alice is not actually Open Source, but has a free license agreement) application called Alice, and they actually enjoyed learning the basics of computer programming!
Continue reading ‘An intro to programming by Alice’