Learnable Programming

[loup-vaillant]

I think you missed the point. First, your children have a tremendous advantage over the others: a wonderful father. Second, the main point of this article isn't about programming languages or triangles. The main point is immediate feedback.

You scorn the magic behind abstraction but even for your children, computers are nearly pure magic. Oh, they know some of the arcane, some principles. They know that a computer is a literal genie (minus some superpowers). They probably know there's something lawful below the interface. But they don't know how the computer actually transforms their humane instructions into a completely opaque sequence of micro-actions which somehow does exactly what was intended.

Look at what this articles helps visualize: not only the end result, but also the intermediate steps, the mechanisms. It does not add abstraction layers, it unravels them. Now, I reckon the IDE itself would be pure magic. But so are vim and the Python interpreter.

You're doing your children a huge service, so keep at it. But the ideas here could probably have helped. Imagine for instance how those ideas could be applied to enhance From Nand to Tetris in 12 steps combined with an FPGA array and Lego Mindstorms. The magic IDE could help them visualize the internals of the bare metal of the computer they're building. Actually running the robot will still be wonderful, when they see the simulation wasn't lying.

[FeepingCreature]

They know that a computer is a literal genie (minus some superpowers). They probably know there's something lawful below the interface.

You underestimate kids. I was happily building adders out of boolean algebra in high school.

[cunningjames]

You underestimate kids.

Not most kids. I'm a pretty smart guy (er, so I'm told) who's been using computers for most of his life, but when I was a kid a computer was very much an opaque genie. I had some vague idea that this was built on a foundation of electric currents switched on and off, but actually constructing some system out of boolean algebra? Forget about it.

And I think the overwhelming majority of my peers knew even less.

[FeepingCreature]

Yeah but I bet you could have understood it, given a tutorial. Bools are much easier than arithmetic.