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Teach your kids to code

Posted on 17 Jan 2008 at 11:08

What's even more galling is that, as computer use has exploded in both homes and offices, children's computing education has gone into reverse. Most IT professionals in their twenties or thirties probably have wistful memories of sitting in front of a BBC Micro at school and rattling out lines of Basic code. Many will also remember sitting in front of a Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum at home and copying out basic programs from magazines or textbooks. None will have forgotten the satisfaction of seeing the program they'd coded by hand come alive on the screen. Do today's children get that same sense of empowerment and discovery from tweaking a few tables in a Word document? What do you think?

Impossibly complex?

There's a wide misconception that today's PCs and software have grown so complex that it's impossible to teach children how to program them. Nonsense. The Java code used in the Greenfoot software we're using for our tutorial isn't significantly more complicated than the Basic of yesteryear.

Greenfoot was launched in 2006, and is developed and maintained by staff at the University of Kent and Deakin University in Australia, with support from Sun Microsystems. It's since been used in schools and colleges across Europe and the US. Greenfoot provides a platform on which children as young as nine or ten can develop two-dimensional simulations and simple games, while learning the valuable, object-orientated programming concepts that will serve them well in future computing courses and careers.

Unlike those Basic programs of the mid-1980s, there's no need to painstakingly bash out lines of code to create basic graphics. Greenfoot includes a number of pre-prepared graphics files to allow children to control and manipulate the crabs, worms and lobsters found in the games, allowing them to focus on the mechanics of the software rather than the monotony of graphics coding.

Greenfoot is a pure Java application that runs cross-platform on any modern Java VM. "Since Greenfoot projects are themselves implemented on the standard Java platform, no limits exist to the sophistication and complexity that Greenfoot games may take," says its co-creator, Dr Kölling. "The platform grows with the experience of the child, and even seasoned programmers can find interesting elements in this environment. The applications that users produce in Greenfoot can be exported to run as standalone applications or as applets running in standard web browsers."

The tutorial we provide is only the beginning. Further tutorials, teaching materials and user communities can be found on the Greenfoot homepage at www.greenfoot.org if you want to help your child progress beyond the basics. And, if Dr Kölling's experience is anything to go by, children will be hungry to learn more. "Teenage pupils can quite easily get to a level where they're making their own games within weeks," he claims. "I've done so with my daughter, who's eight."

The tutorial is designed to be worked through with adult supervision. Some of the early steps, for example, require software installation that shouldn't be left to a child alone. Keep an eye out in PC Pro for the next instalment of our Teach Your Kids to Code series, and let us know how you get on with Greenfoot by dropping us an email at letters@pcpro.co.uk.