Philip Greenspun asks “What’s the Best Computer Language for a 13-year-old Beginner?” and gets an awful lot of responses. Many of them seem to totally miss the mark about how to introduce kids to programming.

In my experience, you have to keep a number of things in mind besides programming languages.

First you have to find out what fascinates the kid in question. Do they want to make a video game? Do they think expressing themselves in a web page is cool? Do they want to pull data from the web and manipulate it somehow? What sort of application would be interesting to them? Some kids are fascinated by programming itself, but most are only using it as a means to an end, and you need to know what that end is to keep their attention.

Next, there are many things that you and I don’t think of as programming that are still programming in the kid’s mind. Creating an web page in HTML is programming. Selecting the correct options in a constrained game editor like RPG Maker XP counts as programming.

To a kid who’s never told a computer what to do before, any kind of direction that the computer will follow counts as programming. It may not have loops, it may not involve typing, but they still have to:

• decide what they want the computer to do,
• understand the tools at their disposal,
• create the instructions,
• try out what they did,
• and figure out what’s wrong when it doesn’t come out right.

That right there, that’s programming.

The last thing to understand: how much help will you be providing? One way to get kids going is to do most of the work yourself, but then give them a very simple control to play with. I wrote a simple video game once, and then showed Max where the initial number of aliens was set. He could change the value from 10 to 50, and see a dramatic difference in the game play. It was eye-opening for him even though he was too young to be able to make substantive changes.

If you are going to help a lot, then you either have to choose a language you already know, or are willing to learn yourself. If you aren’t going to help a lot, then you have to choose a language that won’t need a lot of help. This sounds obvious, but your time commitment is often the toughest variable to get right, so think carefully about it.

All that said, I think there are some interesting unconventional choices for where to start kids with programming:

• Flash: the big advantage here is that you can start by simply making key-frame animations, and then graduate up to Actionscript in small doses. Also, kids have probably already been exposed to tons of Flash content, and so have good cultural understanding of the types of thing they can build with it. Downside: expense, though I had good success with buying a copy a few versions old on eBay, and Academic Superstore will sell you an educational license.
• Scratch is a tile-based visual programming environment. The results can be a little crude by Flash standards, but it’s a very nicely made environment. Actions are expressed by clicking tiles together, so there’s no syntax errors to stumble over. Some of the example projects are quite impressive. One nice detail: the layout of the tile code almost resembles what a textual programming language would look like, so it’s a good stepping stone to more mainstream environments. BTW: MIT also has StarLogo TNG which also uses the tile metaphor for building programs, and uses a more ambitious 3D environment, but seems not quite finished.
• RPG Maker XP is a game editor for making tile-based games like the original Legend of Zelda (I think). The graphics are all created from a large set of tiles, so it’s easy to make environments that look reasonable, and all of the “coding” is done my making choices in dialog boxes. Enormously complicated dialog boxes, but at least there’s no syntax to learn. Max downloaded and figured it out himself when he was 12 or so, and now he’s taught Ben (now 9) how to use it, so it’s approachable, even though I don’t understand it at all. There’s no real path up from there, though, so this is only good if the child in question wants to make RPG games.
• HTML. Don’t worry that this isn’t a programming language, and don’t worry about all the CSS form-vs-content stuff. Your kid will probably be thrilled by <font size=7 color=red> and will have his first taste of where the red pill can take you.

In the conventional languages arena, there are good attempts to bridge the gap from kids to code: Hackety Hack is a tutorial and programming environment for Ruby, and RUR-PLE is a robot simulation using Python.

Whichever tool you choose, remember: they’re kids. Don’t make the mistake of treating them like short adults. They aren’t starting a career, or building a resume. It doesn’t need to be bullet-proof, it doesn’t need the latest theoretical underpinnings. Give them the answers when they are stuck.

Just make it fun.