Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Kids Programming Language:

What is KPL?

KPL stands for Kid’s Programming Language. KPL makes it easy for kids to learn computer programming. KPL makes it fun, too, by making it especially easy to program computer games, with cool graphics and sound. KPL is not just for games, though - it can be used for teaching many different subjects. KPL’s emphasis on games is based on the belief that learning is best when learning is fun.

via Wei-Ming Lee:

One cool feature is that you can directly translate KPL code into C# and VB.NET, making KPL a very good language for getting kids started on programming and then eventually moving into .NET programming using C# or VB.NET.

This is Windows (.NET) freeware only. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like something to try out out on my daughter and her friends.

It bothers me that in my limited observation of school-age kids, there seems to be so much emphasis on being consumers and end-users of media and technology, (or for that matter, government), rather than on taking things apart, seeing how they work, and how they might be made differently or better. This is partly due to the amazing rate of technology integration in everyday items. There are so many layers of implementation abstraction in cell phones, video games, automobiles, or any application software, that it’s hard to see enough of what’s going on to become engaged in the creative process.

I don’t think kids should be spending a huge amount of time learning software programming in elementary school, but I do think that some exposure to the general concepts of problem analysis, decomposition, specification, implementation, and testing as an overall approach would be useful.

Something with animated graphics, sound, and a forgiving interpreter is probably a better bet than starting them out on C#.

Update 10-17-2005 08:42 PDT - a post along similar lines at O’Reilly on Hacking for Kids

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 15th, 2005 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Personal Technology, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.