Monday, December 28, 2009

How To Teach a 12-Year-Old To Program?




I started programming with Quick Basic. I don't remember exactly how I got there, I think I was doing "programming" like stuff with Paint or other such programs and my father instructed me to Quick Basic (this is when I was 7-8 years old). I remember having some game programming with quick basic book, that had simple examples and exercises. It was probably perfect for that age; simple, but still you got to see nice results. If i would had been dropped in to c/c++ instantly, I would probably had dropped whole programming thing.
Next logical translation from that was to Visual Basic, continuing on making own games, mostly top-down ones. It was nice to be in Windows environment, while still having easy language to go by. And there were DirectX libraries available too, and I learned first basics in 3D programming and raytracing. There were also some nice sierra style adventuring games game developing books released and I had couple of them.
Next step is more interesting tho. I had tried c++ for some times already, but I never really liked it. It was too much shit to get by, and wasn't that nice to develop with. I mean, I knew it and could code with it, but I really didn't want to. But I tried Delphi, and fell in love with it, mostly because of it's comprehensive component library, good help and nice coding. To this day I still prefer Delphi in GUI programming unless I really have to use C, it's just a lot nicer.
But the main point being, do not throw him right away to the nerdy shit that programming is. Get him started with the more easy programming languages first. There's a lot more such now a days too. Hell, don't except him to get to c++ programming ever. It's a limited area in work sense. Sure it's good to know it, but it isn't the best language or answer to everything.
Just let it be fun for him, and get him interested on programming on its own merits. Otherwise it's not going to work.








No comments:

Post a Comment