My initial thoughts on Small Basic and my kids experience using it

Hi all, its been a few months since I updated my blog and I am glad to break the break with a good topic I am excited about.

Kids. Actually programming tool for kids to use. I was browsing Microsofts website recently and stumbled upon a page for Small Baisc. My initial thought was, “yet another basic for the masses”. My initial impression was not all that good, the page claimed this app would help kids start programming.

Well a software developer by trade, I have seen my share of different programming languages over the course of years. Some of them easy, some of them tough, but most of them usually tend to become cumbersome and complex once you start to use them. So with all my years of wisdom and my narrow minded ness, I chalked it up this one to a another one of those languages too.

Then I downloaded the development tool and installed it, the installation was smooth, as the download was only a few MB can’t be that difficult.

I opened the app, I liked the splash screen, it was as simple as it can be, came up this initial screen

Not many button /icons, Icon’s were Kid friendly and had clear wording below to show what those button would do. I was hoping for tool Tips, leave alone kid friendly tool tips, did not see that.

I might be mistaken, but I think they have used the new Microsoft’s Ribbon control for the Icons, I wish they had used a different color for the ribbon then the rest of the app.

May be a usability expert was not consulted, may be they did, but I would have marked those buttons differently.

I started to type some words on the text editor section, and I was surprised to see a modified version of the same kind of Intelli sensing that I have with my development tools.

All in all my few minutes was enough to make me think that may be there was enough here to make my kids excited about computer programming.

I called my son and my daughter to take a look at it. There is a word Help document included with the install. This kinda of tutorial or Help is not all that good, but it was better than nothing.

The document was very simple. It was a very good primer to start working with Simple Basic. My kids and I were able to start programming soon. We were on our way to start my son’s Hello world program.

More than them I was more excited that my Kid was programming and writing his firs hello world program.

To my surprise it took us less than 10 minutes to put it together. Once we wrote the program and saved it, we were able to run it and get his expected results.

What surprised me more was, my son was able to grasp some of the concepts of programming fairly quickly . I was expecting to teach him to to type, how to save or even what does saving mean. I was going to teach him what the output window was, or what a window was. However, he seems to get most of those concepts quickly so did my daughter. That’s when I struck me that they type their names a lot in video games , they save their files in a Wii consoles, they open saved files from PS2 Memory cards. They know what an output window was, cuz they see popup windows when they play games on the computer.

Well, once we go the basic of saving, opening, and running programs was learnt, we started to move on to other concepts in programming like declaring variables and expressions for calculations.

Pretty soon we were doing stuff that I only learnt later in my learing programming experience. It was fun time with my kids and I felt proud of my kids. Since I was a computer programmer myself and I taught my kids how to program, it was like teaching my trade to my kids like how it was done for ages with Masons or butchers or black smiths etc.

Since that day, I have never had a chance to sit with my kids to do that again, its been a busy fe weeks since then. But my kids have been asking me to work with them to do it. I am thinking about installing this software on their laptop for them to play with. I think that if I do that without proper guidance they might get side tracked and might get frustrated with programming and might not continue to do it or even find an aversion to it.

I certainly plan on working with my kids again and expose them to the joys of programming. Who knows they might do something extraordinary with it.

One of my goals in this process is to document most of my work with them and post them as an informal tutorials so more kids or parents can use them.

Well, wish me luck and patience while I teach my kids how to program using Simple Basic. Visit back for more tutorials and information on this.