As the edu-team was asked for good resources to teach kids to programm, I thought the answer (or more a summary of the answers) might be intersting to others as well.
To everybody who considers teaching kids to code and the spirit of Free Software development, let me start with one piece of advise many experienced educators give and which seems to be prooven by a recent study:
Students are most engaged when they have a creative outlet or where there is a big “wow-factor”. They are less engaged with tools that are strongly scaffolded for learning and don’t lead to a creative result.
This is why I like the Coding Goûter initiative so much!
fiddling with the OLPC for the first time (cc-by Leeming)
There is already so much out there that I need some feed-back on which resources are really recommendable. So, here’s what we’ve collected so far:
- Resourses to teach kids programming at happynerds.net
- CoderDojo.com (There was an article in the Guardian about CoderDojos recently)
- Learn to Code JavaScript by Playing a Game at codecombat.com
- I haven’t had a closer look at code.org yet. As visitors see the portaits of Zuckerberg and Gates at the start page, it looks rather suspicous in regards to Software Freedom. However, the materials provided are at least under CC by-nc-sa and their code is supposed to be “open source” (as I said, I haven’t checked). Remy DeCausemaker said in a recent post: “I’ve gotten software companies to fund Code.org, but that doesn’t mean they run it.” Good enough for me to list it here as it really doesn’t look bad at the first sight.
- OpenHatch and their “Bring open source to your campus” program. (post by Shauna Gordon-McKeon that describes how OpenHatch brings Free Software to Campus and how they scaled “in a box”)
- greenfoot.org Object orientation with Java. Create ‘actors’ which live in ‘worlds’ to build games, simulations, and other graphical programs.
- Sagan Project. The Sagan-1 Robot Simulator is used to program a robot using simple commands, convenient for kids around 10-14 years old, graphical simulate the outcome and send it (after background cross-compiling) into a real robot.
- codeclubworld.org
Playing with hardware
- Arduino (post by Luis Ibanez on “Testing and tinkering with the Arduino Starter Pack”)
- Michael Shiloh from Arduino asks teachers on a mailinglist why they want to use Arduino in education. He is working on a curriculum for high school students.
- USB4butia, a free (as in Freedom) inputoutput board.
- Open hardware for education with littleBits library of electronic modules The circuits are licensed under the CERN Open Hardware License Version 1.2. and available on github
- The Finch is designed to support an engaging introduction to the art of programming. It has support for over a dozen programming languages and environments, including several environments appropriate for students as young as eight years old. Charlie Reisinger writes about the power of programmers and how one can teach more kids to become that powerful with Scratch and The Finch.
- We’ve also been participating in courses for kids and taught them how to program FreeDroidz, Lego Mindstorm robots flashed with free firmware.
Software
- PyGame (Article on edulibre in Spanish that explains how to teach programming by developing videogames with pygame)
- Scratch (Report from OLPC San Francisco how they introduced kids to programming with Scratch as they were not allowed to change anything on the computers)
- Logo (Turtle) (see this Turtle tutorial collection, and the TurtleacAdemy.com)