Teaching a child to program in 2006

My son, Elijah, is now 16 months old. I have reflected once or twice on how I might go about introducing him to computer programming (in a few years, once he's older).

I myself first learned to program circa 1983, on an original IBM PC that my dad brought home from work. Like other PCs of the time, this machine did not have a hard disk; if booted with no floppy disk in the A: drive, a BASIC programming environment would come up. I remember writing programs that would do math problems, as well as some simple games, eventually including a Zork-like text-based adventure game.

It was a pretty nice "sandbox" environment to be able to experiment and learn in. The programming environment was easy to access (just turn on the machine!), and since the machine didn't even have a hard drive, and no floppy in the drive, I couldn't do anything to damage any of my dad's data.

So when Eli is ready to try out some programming for the first time, I've wondered, given today's much-changed environment from the one in which I learned to code back in the early 80s, how might I go about it? This afternoon, I came across a really nice series of blog posts by David Bau about how he went about first helping his (at the time) 6-year-old son learn to program.

David and his son Anthony start out writing just a text-based program, just like I used to do on the old IBM PC (and, as David writes, that he used to do on an old Atari machine). Despite the standard of today's kids' software of having rich visuals and sound, Anthony was pretty excited just to be able to create a text-based "guess the number" game (featuring a vampire!). And once Anthony was ready to want to add some simple graphics and sound to his game, David was able to figure out how to get it done with the help of some brief research via Google and some free libraries.

As a programmer and the parent of a young child, I found David's story to be an informative (as well as enjoyable and heartwarming) read. I now have a better idea of how I can go about first helping Eli learn to program when the time comes!