I read an article in Salon Technology today called Why Johnny can’t code. This is exactly why I’m starting this class. Please read the article and let me know what you think
For three years — ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade — he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We’ve searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC.
I embarked on the exact same quest myself back in 2000-2001. Fortunately, I found QuickBASIC and then Cybiko, for which I could program in BASIC thanks to Greg Smith’s B2C (Basic-2-C) compiler. It certainly wasn’t easy. I sought out many variations of BASIC, QBASIC, and QuickBasic, and I remember spending a lot time surfing around on search engines. Most of the interpreters would run on Windows, but they were originally designed for DOS. So I had to make it work, and fortunately, I was very persistent.
Kids are not doing “something else” other than BASIC. Not millions of them. Not hundreds or tens of thousands of them. Hardly any of them, in fact. It is not their fault. Because some of them, like my son, really want to. But they can’t. Not without turning into time travelers, the way we did, by giving up (briefly) on the present and diving into the past.
This is so true and so sad. I asked my sister today how she would experimentally roll two dice 100 times and find the probabilities of each of the totals. Her only ideas were to:
- Physically roll dice 100 times. How about 1,000 times?
- “Mentally guess” random numbers and then count up the statistics. Try doing this for 10,000 rolls!
In other words, it’s impossible. But it’s easy to do with just a little bit of basic programming experience. And that’s exactly what I’m going to provide.
Elliot