Re: Ice breakers

[Paul K <paulclinger@...>]

> Most people think that programming should result in a visual reward of 
sorts. I think there is a tremendous amount of validity in that, but I 
haven't personally experienced it.

I tend to agree with this. I've experienced it with my 8-year old when I showed him turtle graphics in Lua (http://notebook.kulchenko.com/education/drawing-trees-with-turtles) and also with an introductory computer science  class of high-school students I taught last summer.

I have about 50+ turtle graphics and spirograph type scripts in my EduPack (as well as few Love2d demos) and they may work well for 8-13 year olds as a starter (https://github.com/pkulchenko/ZeroBraneEduPack). Most of scripts are very simple, but can generate some interesting graphics.

I also have a set of simple lessons, but it only covers basics of string and numerical operations (https://github.com/pkulchenko/ZeroBraneEduPack/tree/master/programming-lessons). They are integrated with ZeroBrane Studio (in fact they are packaged with it), which provides formatting and links to navigate between the lessons, ability to execute commands from the IDE and run simple tests. The idea behind this integration is to minimize context switching between reading materials and tweaking or executing examples.

Paul.

ZeroBrane Studio - slick Lua IDE and debugger for Windows, OSX, and Linux - http://studio.zerobrane.com/

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 6:45 AM, Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 3:31 AM, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Ti Kl <j.qannan@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can you please help me in listing some examples of icebrwakers for kids.

You mean, 'ways to learn Lua that are not scary'?

steve d.

Depends on how young they are, but puzzles seem effective for me. I've always enjoyed the "bottles of pop" problem. (I like beer or bags of weed, but these are kids, you know).

The way that I do it is:

1: Start with showing them how to print "Hello, world!" For the 8-10 year old, this leads to a very short bit where they type some more things and have it print.

2: Show how you can play ad lib by making a variable called "verb" and one called "noun". Put "hello" into verb and "world" into noun.

3: Then have them do multiple print statements with different variables.

4: Make more complex sentences with more than one verb and noun, using "verb1", "verb2", etc. If they're old enough you can ad "adjective", "adverb", "conjunction", etc.

5: Then introduce how you can iterate through a list of variables with a for loop.

6: Step 5 should be cut short as you "discover" that it's really hard to go through a list of variables. Hmm... how can we group variables in such a way to make it easy to find them, one after another? How about tables?

6:Hey! What if we made our program sing the song "99 bottles of pop on the wall"?

Most people think that programming should result in a visual reward of sorts. I think there is a tremendous amount of validity in that, but I haven't personally experienced it. That is, the response that I get when I show them Codea on my iPad is about the same as sitting down with them, a crappy text editor and Lua. They either like to program or they do not. That said, I cannot recommend Codea enough. It is superfunawesomehappytimemaximumloud, to the max.

The great thing about Lua is that there isn't much garbage to teach. It's extremely accessible.

-Andrew