Check out the posters Dean Putney designed to encourage youngsters to learn code.
I designed these posters for my Communication Design Fundamentals final project at Carnegie Mellon University. These are meant to be put in schools, and are specifically designed to target 6th grade and middle school students. They can be printed on standard sized printer paper, or on 11×17 paper with a little trimming.
Programming Promotion Posters [Dean Putney]
…If they want kids to learn to code properly, give them boxes with limited RAM access, like we old folks had to deal with in the days of the VIC-20. Now *THERE* was a box that taught you how to code tightly and efficiently. Token coding still needs to be used today, kids.
HI KIDS!!!! Today we’re going to learn about POINTERS!
In my opinion, kids should know how to make a little website and have an idea of what goes into making the computer run. This is the first step to making IT jobs less aggravating.
I agree completely with #3!
Luckily I don’t work in IT support but there’s always instances where is completely oblivious to what you consider should be a basic concept to them… This ranges from grasping what a screen resolution setting is to actual programming problems like input sanitization (oh I’ll just add this input field to our web app and feed whatever it contains into the database. I won’t let QA know what I’ve done and I certainly won’t write a comment for the commit. Maybe I’ll just exec whatever is input for the hell of it…).
It might be asking a lot to have every kid learn programming, I mean not every one is cut out for programming just like every one isn’t cut out for major leauge football..
But it would certainly make my job easier seeing as a few of those kids will eventually end up as IT managers if they don’t make the cut as developers!
I really like the GameBoy one. That’s the type of thing that will get the attention of a kid.
I got into programming through LOGO, which I then used to control extremely simple LEGO robots through an after-school program.
Games like RoboCode, Boku, and Light-Bot and awesome programmable robots… that’s the stuff that kids will love.