I've been talking about the increasing importance of learning how to program at schools for a while now and recently the UK government has finally seen sense and changed the national curriculum to include computer science.
I've been looking at different programming languages to teach at our school and I have two that I'd like to show you today:
Scratch is a language developed at MIT to make programming work in a GUI, it's great because it has a friendly interface and allows kids to see what their programs do straight away. It's quite limited, but even within these bounds it's amazing what's possible! I've been very impressed with some of the games my lot have come up with!
For a more "serious" programming course, I've been using Microsoft's Small Basic. It too is a simple IDE that holds your hand a bit, but everything is text based, making it much more akin to "real" programming with C++ etc. It's based on the much maligned visual basic language but it's still good for teaching loops, variables and objects.
For the lazier of the IT teachers out there, Codecademy runs an online course that awards progress with badges and rewards. It reminds me a lot of the w3 schools online HTML training.
