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Re:RAD Basic – Compatible with Visual Basic 6 projects by dsugarman on Friday May 06, 2022 @07:33AM (#31283907)
I agree. I knew I wanted to start programming in 3rd grade and it was such an intuitive way for me to learn. It let me spin up cool shit without a ton of overhead. Now I have 2 kids and I'm wondering what will be the equivalent for them when they're a little older. It seems like there's a lot out there designed for kids but it all seems so rigid like program your character instead of make your own program.
Re:RAD Basic – Compatible with Visual Basic 6 projects by zozbot234 on Friday May 06, 2022 @07:38AM (#31283937)
Scratch is rather VBish in that you can endow "characters" with their own behavior and have them "react" to asynchronous events.
Re:RAD Basic – Compatible with Visual Basic 6 projects by skeeter2020 on Friday May 06, 2022 @09:12AM (#31284700)
Scratch is great for understanding a lot of the concepts like properties, branching and loops but IMO goes too far towards the visual side. I liked the paradigm of "perform the action on the object" then "write the code in the container" that gets created or linked. We didn't really have formal "user stories" back then but programming essentially walked you through the "when I ... then ..." process.
Re:RAD Basic – Compatible with Visual Basic 6 projects by zozbot234 on Friday May 06, 2022 @09:17AM (#31284745)
Typing text is a nuisance at a young age. Visual interaction makes sense as a starting point.