Help with gathering resources for how to learn programming for children book

[Matthias Kirschner]

Dear Michael,

* Michael McMahon [2021-10-26 18:38 +0200]:
> I have several years of experience teaching introductory programming 
> concepts to children aged 6-18 in an after school setting using free 
> software.

First of all thank you very much for your great feedback. Will try that
out in the coming years.

Would you be able to include the information below on
https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/ProgrammingForChildren ? If so let me
know if you need any help with that. 

> The 5-6 age range (at least with my students) was limited to drag and 
> drop concepts such as Music Blocks [1], Blockly [2], Scratch 1.4 [3], 
> and code.org.  Music Blocks, Blockly, and the old offline Scratch 
> version 1.4 are the only popular drag and drop options that are 100% 
> free software that I am aware of.
> 
> Around the age of 10, I would switch them away from drag and drop 
> languages to Python or Lua if they were inclined through modifying 
> simple games and modifying Minetest mods.
> 
> I would primarily recommend Music Blocks as it can even be used offline 
> through a browser on old hardware.  The surrounding Sugar project [4] is 
> also appropriate for this age group and can be found bundled with 
> Trisquel [5].
> 
> Blockly is more of a framework than an easy to point to resource.  
> Scratch is more focused on vendor lock-in rather than generally teaching 
> programming in my opinion as there are not resources for moving on from 
> Scratch within their platform.
> 
> I would also recommend the book Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer 
> Science and Other Improbable Things by Carlos Bueno from No Starch Press 
> [6] which targets ages 10 and up.
> 
> [1] https://musicblocks.sugarlabs.org/
> 
> [2] https://github.com/google/blockly https://developers.google.com/blockly/
> 
> [3] https://scratch.mit.edu/scratch_1.4
> 
> [4] https://www.sugarlabs.org/
> 
> [5] http://mirror.fsf.org/trisquel-images/trisquel-sugar_9.0_amd64.iso 
> https://cdimage.trisquel.info/trisquel-images/trisquel-sugar_9.0_amd64.iso.sha256
> 
> [6] https://nostarch.com/laurenipsum

Best regards,
Matthias 

-- 
Matthias Kirschner - President - Free Software Foundation Europe
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Contact (fsfe.org/about/kirschner)       Weblog k7r.eu/blog.html