Posted By
crock
on 2016-01-14
05:20:47
 |  Re: Beginning Programming
Well, there is certainly more relevant languages for kids to learn nowadays such as Scratch, Tynker and Sneak, which are structured in such a way as to introduce children to modern programming concepts.
But that doesn't make using an old computer irrelavant. My daughters first program was a maths quiz we wrote together on a PET 2001 - that was only a couple of years ago and she was 9 at the time. You can still learn the basics of flow control, data-types and boolean logic which is just as relevant today in any IT department as it was then.
The issue is more likely to be the expectation of the child. When I got my first computer (a TRS-80 model 1) in 1979 at age 8, I learnt to program in basic for entertainment, as commercial games were almost nonexistent and my parents would not have bought them for me anyways. Nowadays most kids in developed countries have access to game consoles, tablets and some even have their own smart phones by age of 10 and thus and they get limitless quantities of "entertainment" served up for free.
It may be that you can instill in your kids the joy of creating something for the sake of creation alone, meaning that is the usefulness of the project is not as important as the thrill they get from knowing that they created it themselves. I've had some success with that, but it's a struggle to keep the interest up on my old computers. The payoff comes much quicker on modern GUI based kids languages. In that respect the Plus/4 would still be better than a PET or 64 as the Basic 3.5 at least has some graphics primitives.
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