How do elementary and middle schools teach programming?

When I was a kid, the local ISD was firmly in the Apple II camp.  Starting in third grade, we were given access to a single Apple II+ running MathBlaster and other software (and no training whatsoever - we just figured it out).  By 4th grade, Apple IIe's were starting to show up in a newfangled Computer class.  Virtually no programming of any kind was taught.

By middle school they started teaching programming, still on Apple IIe's, in Basic.  It went into graphics very quickly, as that was easy in Applesoft Basic.  It covered a good bit, in that language.  There was also some Logo, but only as a brief introduction.  By High School we were learning Pascal, on PC's, and graphics didn't happen so easily, though there was more emphasis on math.

What I'm wondering is (in relation to a private project)...  what languages are elementary/middle-school children started on today,
and what are the strengths and weaknesses of those platforms?  What's missing in those languages?  Are they still predominantly text-based, or have they moved into the realm of graphics and sound?

My schools growing up had horrible IT courses...I didn't get a chance to even start learning HTML until Highschool. And even then, my own toying around at home on weekends put me way beyond what the teacher was capable of teaching. By the time he was explaining the paragraph tag, I was getting into Javascript.

No programming at all in middle school, although that was when I started playing around with stuff like HTML and Qbasic.

My high school used Java pretty much exclusively, but only console stuff until senior year.  Then we went on to web apps (using Java and Tapestry).

thumbtacks wrote:

What a sad state of affairs if they no longer teach basic programming in elementary or middle school. I remember being asked (along with three other people) to teach Applesoft BASIC to others.
 
In sixth grade.

On the side, a couple of us were cranking out video games, so that probably helped. But starting off in HTML isn't exactly what I'd call "programming" per se. It's a markup language. This is one area though where I think the PC platform has failed to a large part...getting students in schools interested in programming at a young age. Apple succeedly wildly in this area for a long time. They understood how to do this, or probably more specifically, Steve Wozniak understood how to do it. When I first fired up a PC (a long time ago) I immediately searched for a way to program it. The only default tool Windows gave me was QBASIC, and it was buried deep in a DOS directory. With an old Apple, you could flip the switch and immediately be able to program in at least two different languages...assembly and BASIC. Sure, Windows users had DEBUG and all that, but it wasn't obvious. Being able to simply type:
 
10 PRINT "MY NAME IS THUMBTACKS"
20 GOTO 10

...allows for immediate feedback. That gets a person interested. With PCs, that wasn't always the case (or specifically Windows).

I got started with GW-BASIC on MS-DOS 4.01, so not having an Apple didn't obstruct me.

10 PRINT "Gisteren wist ik niet was een programma was"
20 PRINT "Vandaag ben ik een programmeur"

That was my first program, copied verbatim from a borrowed book when I was ten (the text means "Yesterday I didn't know what a program was" and "Today I am a programmer")

Also, I didn't get any programming tought at school. My elementary school had one Apple (don't remember what model, I think it may have been an early Mac), I seem to recall writing a story on it once in some word processing app but that's all we ever did with it. It certainly wasn't part of standard curriculum.

Computer class at high school meant being tought how to use Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS, even though Word for Windows 6.0 was already released at that time. Besides that and playing games on the school's heavily outdated XT computers I can't recall every doing anything else there. We certainly weren't tought how to program anything.

CannotResolveSymbol wrote:



thumbtacks wrote: What a sad state of affairs if they no longer teach basic programming in elementary or middle school. I remember being asked (along with three other people) to teach Applesoft BASIC to others.   In sixth grade. On the side, a couple of us were cranking out video games, so that probably helped. But starting off in HTML isn't exactly what I'd call "programming" per se. It's a markup language. This is one area though where I think the PC platform has failed to a large part...getting students in schools interested in programming at a young age. Apple succeedly wildly in this area for a long time. They understood how to do this, or probably more specifically, Steve Wozniak understood how to do it. When I first fired up a PC (a long time ago) I immediately searched for a way to program it. The only default tool Windows gave me was QBASIC, and it was buried deep in a DOS directory. With an old Apple, you could flip the switch and immediately be able to program in at least two different languages...assembly and BASIC. Sure, Windows users had DEBUG and all that, but it wasn't obvious. Being able to simply type:   10 PRINT "MY NAME IS THUMBTACKS" 20 GOTO 10 ...allows for immediate feedback. That gets a person interested. With PCs, that wasn't always the case (or specifically Windows).

Sure, we had Apple II's in elementary school...  but programming wasn't a priority.  I don't even believe we had access to the disks that had BASIC on them.  The computers were just for the assortment of MECC software the school had...  they had no intention of teaching programming.

I don't even think that programming should be an emphasis, at least not until middle school.  There are many more important things to be done at lower grades, like building reading and writing skills.

In junior high, we had a mix of older Mac's and Apple ][e's. After me and another guy were permanently banned from the Mac's (We wouldn't slow down the the snails pace that the teacher ran the class at and forced everybody else to slow down to) We spent the rest of the term programming the ][e's. We almost lost that when another guy got into trouble for rewriting strings in the games that the school had for them.

In high school we had classes for BASIC and C++, but the teacher had a heart attack and stopped teaching before I was halfway through the BASIC class. After that we were put in the care of a permanent substitute who didn't care what we did, and ended up giving everybody A's in the end. Too bad, it was almost 5 years before I picked up programming again.

By the time I started programming again, I wished I'd had those 5 years back.

We learned some BASIC programming on the Apple IIe's in grammar school. At least I think it was BASIC; it's been so long since then. My high school offered java and c++. At least I remember that.

I'm in high school now.

There is no programming at all untill you can take an AP class, which covers basic Java.

thumbtacks wrote:

10 PRINT "MY NAME IS THUMBTACKS"

20 GOTO 10

That code looks like this in VB.NET.

the only programming i was taught in school was turbo pascal in my last year. They didn't really teach us they just kinda left us to figure it out for ourselves.

I was already doing win32 programming by this stage (i didn't know about .net or C# in those days) so i figured pascal out fairly easiler.

our computer class didn't really teach us any thing. I learnt more about physics and the paranormal in that class than computers

that teacher was weird.