Teaching Children to Program with Small Basic[Updated Feb 2010]

As hopefully many of you know I am a huge advocate of teaching children to program, not to turn them over to the geek side but to teach them the life skills of problem solving and analysis. On a personal side I have been championing My First Programming Language a tool to get children a step up to programming in Basic by providing graphical tools as a precursor to coding.

I have also been promoting Kodu and Small Basic as tools people should be looking at to teach children to program.

Lynn Lagit (SoCalDevGal) and LLewellyn Falco have produced a series of videos based on the workshops they are running for children as well as some extensions for Small Basic.

For convenience here are links to the videos, but I urge you look look at Lynn’s blog for more details

Setting up Small Basic

First Recipe

Coding Recipe Variations

They base their teaching on a set of recipes for teaching programming which are available here

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