I hope God shall forgive me but my grandon (7 years young) wants to write games and to know how to do it, and I have decided to teach him.
He is now at the end of 1st class of elementry school, knows the English letters and very little math.
I havee started by building a tool to enable coding by icons instead of lines of code, of course the program that I wrote does the translation:
The program has a field to put the scenario on, a list of commands and a board in which commands and parameters can be selected. When run, the monkey walks and does what the commands tell it to do.
With this tool I was able to teach parameters (for example the first row says "walk 7 steps"), loops, variables (here only one, A) , subs (only one ) and if then else phrases (is bannana ?).
The next step is to write real code in English. I use the Turtle tool with some aids (show X and Y position on the screen when mouse is clicked etc.) and with a translation tool in which the common commands of the Turtle are listed in Hebrew and when any of them is selected, the required line in English can be pasted to the code in the IDE. If a parameter is included the user can change on the IDE since it is a number, not words.
My grandson is now able to write simple code like drawing the flag here, using the principles that were aquired before.:
He is now at the end of 1st class of elementry school, knows the English letters and very little math.
I havee started by building a tool to enable coding by icons instead of lines of code, of course the program that I wrote does the translation:
The program has a field to put the scenario on, a list of commands and a board in which commands and parameters can be selected. When run, the monkey walks and does what the commands tell it to do.
With this tool I was able to teach parameters (for example the first row says "walk 7 steps"), loops, variables (here only one, A) , subs (only one ) and if then else phrases (is bannana ?).
The next step is to write real code in English. I use the Turtle tool with some aids (show X and Y position on the screen when mouse is clicked etc.) and with a translation tool in which the common commands of the Turtle are listed in Hebrew and when any of them is selected, the required line in English can be pasted to the code in the IDE. If a parameter is included the user can change on the IDE since it is a number, not words.
My grandson is now able to write simple code like drawing the flag here, using the principles that were aquired before.:
