I only blogged about Small Basic a couple of days ago, then this video was posted on Channel 9 this morning.
Obviously my blog is highly influential, Microsoft are taking a keen interest and acting as a result.
Or, I suppose it could be a coincidence? Nah!
My eldest son has been asking me for ages to teach him some programming. I remember learning to program in BASIC on a Sinclair Spectrum and using LOGO on the BBC Micro’s in school and was looking for something as simple as that for him to start to learn with. I didn’t want to scare him off with a jump straight into some OOP language and the complexities of a modern IDE.
I also considered showing him some HTML, but he really wanted to program and I didn’t want to confuse him straight away with differences between presentation and logic etc.
.jpg "Small Basic")
After a surprisingly long search, at one point of which I had decided that I was going to write something myself, I found Small Basic from Microsoft. It looks like it is exactly what I wanted. It can be found in the Kid’s Corner section of the MSDN Beginner Developer Learning Center, which also has a lot of great articles, videos, learning programmes and links to other useful resources.
Small Basic is currently in version 0.9, which probably explains why it has not got a massive presence web yet, and has support for BASIC and LOGO. Perfect!
Microsoft have provided a blog and forums for support. The first post in the Small Basic blog explains some of the history of the project and shows that I was not the only one struggling to find a good way to teach my kids to program.
We are going to start this weekend, I’ll blog about our experiences and progress. I can’t wait! Wish us luck!
BRING OUT THE TURTLE….
Yobe wa Kanyenda is discussing.
Yobe wa Kanyenda 7:31 am on January 12, 2011 Permalink
Thanks for the insight. Just downloaded and installed Small Basic. Run the quick Turtle program – simply magnifique!
Looking forward to reading about your experiences. I have been in a similar situation with my two daughters (12 and 10) who have been bugging me to teach them programming. I looked at Scratch and Alice, but I could not get round to dedicating time to getting accustomed to the products since I have been programming in Visual Basic 6 for about 8 years now (my whole programming career) – old habits die hard, I suppose. I have only moved to the .NET platform on C# some two and half years back and you can see my predicament
The best of luck