note that even the geeks?those

who voluntarily choose to major in hard sciences?enter university never having programmed a computer. When I was in grade six, the Commodore PET came out, and I jumped at the opportunity to learn how to program it. Now, evidently, most high school computer classes are about Word (tm) and Excel (tm). Is this a bad thing? Should we care?" Do you think the desire to program computers has declined in the younger generations? If so, what reasons might you cite as the cause?"

I am not surpised at this. I have noticed this trend for at least three years now. Kids (in Australia at least) are into multimedia and GAMES. They can see the importance of being a competent user of technology - hence the growth in more general ICT (information & communications technology) elements in all subject areas. THis should not be denigrated - it is a simple fact of life in our modern information age. Re programming - kids want to PLAY GAMES most of all! Many would like to program their own games ... but do not wish to put in the time/ effort neccessary to develop the level of skill required. In addition, programming ... as many of us in this list know it ... is primarily CONSOLE BASED - by this I mean you spend alot of time entering text on a screen to run the thing to get more text on the screen - BORING BORING BORING ... FOR MODERN KIDS! THis is why so many schools (once again in Australia) teach VB. THe VB GUI is sooo good and allows students to create REAL LIVE Windows programs with pull down menus, dialogue boxes etc with very little effort (and no understanding). But even this is putting many kids off know - a - days - the kids don't like the "business world" feel of it all or the preponderance of business problems that many teachers tend to favour (yes me too :)). Like I said at the start kids want games, fun and multimedia - colour, music and animation / video. I tried to get a class into PyGame two years ago - but even this requires such a large amount of background skill and knowledge. Since then I have moved to GameMaker (take a look and you will see why kids love it! gamemaker.nl). I said on this list about two or three years ago - Python (and all "fringe" languages) need to become like VB in terms of the IDE - if it doesn't it simply will not be taken up in schools. On a separate tack - I have TWO students in the whole school of 960, who are now in yr12, who just love to program and want to learn everything they possibly can about programming. I can show these kids any language and they go for it wholeheartedly simply because they have a passsion for this area of human endeavour. In yr7 they were into basic, blitzbasic and darkbasic - over the years I have encouraged their development in Python, Haskel and Prolog ... and in every one of these they know far far more than I ever will. regards ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- regards Darren Payne Hurlstone Agricultural High School Ph: 9829 9222 Fax: 98292026 ____________________________________________________ On Yahoo!7 360°: Your own space to share what you want with who you want! http://www.yahoo7.com.au/360