Kent

I was a TA for a summer class for gifted freshmen/sophomore high school students (the class being taught at UC-San Diego). We 'taught' them programming using Lego Mindstorms [http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/default.asp]. Their 'final project' was a competition to see who could build the best robot to navigate from one end of the class room to another through a random obsticle course.

It was a fun class to TA and help out with, although sadly many of the male students were more interested in flirting with the couple of cute female students than they were in programming. They'll never be real programmers with that attitude! :-p

Thank you so much for posting about KPL!

KPL was born out of my frustration with teaching my own children to program.

Attempting to show a 7 year old child, however bright, how to include namespaces, add references, and create a new Console project, when all I really wanted to teach him at that time was how to declare a variable and use it in a loop was just painful for me and incredibly boring to him.

Even putting together a template program which had most of the "behind the scenes" functionality complete and in which he could just fill in the blanks was not satisfactory. Clearly, I needed something targeted specifically at kids, that would be simple enough to learn and exciting enough to generate a long-term interest.

Looking around on the web, I was not able to find anything that really fit the bill as far as I was concerned. I want my children to be interested enough to keep with it, and there are many programs out there that are very interesting, most of which are either largely graphical in nature or not quite in line with what I was looking for. I strongly feel that children need to learn core concepts like variables, loops, flow-control, scoping, etc.

So, with no free programs available that really got me excited, I had to create my own. KPL is the result, and continues to evolve as my children (and now the public at large) provide feedback and begin to learn how to program. When I showed the early version of KPL to my friends and coworkers at Morrison Schwartz, they loved it as much I did and we decided to work together to make it a great program available for all children. We at Morrison Schwartz have many features planned for KPL's future, and several enhancements are currently in the works.

I hope that many people find KPL as useful in teaching their own children as I have found it to be when teaching mine. My children are now so excited about programming that we actually all sat down at the computer and watched *all* of the DigiPen webcasts on game development that we found out about on Coding4Fun, and even ordered the free T-Shirts! Imagine a 7 year old watching those webcasts and actually having some understanding of the concepts being discussed!! Yes, we are a geek family, and proud of our addiction to programming ;)

Yep, thanks for blogging KPL, Kent! Since you did we've added volunteers who'll do Italian- and Polish-language translations for the KPL IDE. Great example of the global power of blogging, isn't it?

When I was in 6th grade, I used to flip through back issues of Creative Computing. The fact that DOS had a simple BASIC editor on it made it easy for me to try and program the games from the magazine into my Dad's computer. When I wasn't sure what something was, I'd just ask my Dad. It also helped that things like Nibbles were already on there and I could look at their code.

Even now, I feel some sort of deep fondness for Creative Computing. Why is there nothing like that now?

The web site linked in the article went down for some kind of reason. Does anybody have a mirror setup somewhere?

Hmm--
KPL is still error 403 forbidden. I really wish they would get it fixed. I got the link from a Microsoft page.. and its been down for over a week now.. gee whiz.

I'll let them know. In the meantime, you can get some info on KPL at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/coolapplications/KPL/default.aspx

It's strange -- I don't get a 403 error trying to hit their site at all. Can you try: http://www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com/ instead?

I think this might be relevant:

http://pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/archive/2005/02/20/6009.aspx

As you all know, I'm a fan of transitions, and more than willing to sacrifice a goat to Janus. So, here's...