My son started on Scratch, then Minecraft, and 15 years later he's working on designing jigs in parametric CAD for space lasers. I'm sure he'll be fine.
This was when Scratch was still a downloaded program. The community was also really encouraging back then - you'd see adults and kids commenting on new projects and cheering people on, remixing, and sharing knowledge.
Whether a kid is going to take to programming or not is pretty unlikely to change based on whether they're introduced to a block-based or text-based language, or whether it's object oriented or functional (the push for objects-first has mostly died off, but I still see remnants of it in various curricula).
If it's got a few basics like conditionals, iteration, structured grammar, etc. it will be plenty to give students the flavor of what programming is about.
The better criteria, in my mind, are "does it allow you to make/do something interesting?" and "how easily does it lead into the next level of learning?".
kylecazar•39m ago
I'm an American that took a C++ class in Europe when I was 13 (forward thinking school in retrospect). But when asked, I usually say scripting RS bots was what got me into the field, because I had fun and it was more memorable.
But would I have chosen to do that had I no idea what coding was? Maybe not...
sbuttgereit•18m ago
The actual programming was always a means to that gaming end back then and not the end in itself. So in that sense I can completely relate to where you're coming from.
Over a couple years of that, it started to dawn on me that the programming itself had a power and interest all its own worth pursuing.
But I think if it was dropped in front of me as something I ought to do, no matter how dressed up in "fun" it was, it would have set off my non-conformist predispositions a little too much.
em-bee•10m ago
feels to me not that different. just that the targets are no longer games but other kinds of applications.
enobrev•1m ago
I had a trash-80 in the early 80s and used to copy BASIC from magazines, and then in the mid 90s I bought a book with a CD in it that taught me how to set up perl-based e-commerce store, which I set up for my mom's retail shop. Neither of those got me interested in programming.
The event in my life that got me there was around 2000, when I bought a Cold Fusion 4 book off of a street vendor - literally on Wall Street - and I spent my evenings building an intranet that replaced the Access database that my company shipped and merged across the country every Friday.
That's when I got hooked.
Not sure if something like Scratch would have gotten me there (LOGO definitely didn't) - but I imagine the level of comfort I had with computers at a young age kept me in the vicinity that eventually got me there.