I have a very similar experience with "Teach the kids to code". When i was in 5th grade our school bought a couple of computers and started teaching Logo(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29). It was simple little language, and all of us were excited cause we could make computer draw something for us.
After that the curriculum for the higher standards moved more towards the MSOffice, Lotus123 stuff which really bored me out, so i moved my interest to physics.
Incidentally i was drawn back to computers for playing games(not programming), students exchange lot of pirated games. My curiosity with the computer was back when one of the games was not working on my dads PC. I had to learn about exe, dll(apparently games needed many of these strange little files), Direct X, opengl, screen resolution, and lot more stuff.
Before i knew it, many of friends needed my help to troubleshoot their PCs, which game me lot of PCs to do my hardware/software experiments with :). And i gradually moved myself to programming again.
My final year CS projects was a warehouse management system using RFID and Java. From Logo to Java it took me 10 years, it may be a slow growth according to HN standards, but teaching kids the wrong stuff will really turn them away.
I have a similar background, with my earliest programming experience in Logo, drawing fun shapes. I then got into PC games, dealing with batch files, config.sys, and HIMEM to extract extra KBs of conventional memory.
I got back into programming when a friend and I built a flash card program to help us study vocabulary and memorize Chemistry equations. Programming is fun when it has a purpose!
I think this is the real key. It's one thing to teach kids programming, but you cannot teach them why its useful in the same way many engineers discovered why it was useful.
I cannot agree more. Too many students find the subjects they are studying "pointless." Who will take the time to learn something they think (quite possibly rightfully so) is pointless.
Same here.. We had logo and a sheet of commands to help us draw shapes. I got into trouble because within 5 minutes I'd binned the paper and was writing my name. I was amazed by the keyboard and the interaction. I was making "Something" happen and I could see it. Straight away. Really got me hooked. Never looked back, I do programming for career / hobby. Just so happy really I had access to that sort of thing as from what I read, it isn't that common!
After that the curriculum for the higher standards moved more towards the MSOffice, Lotus123 stuff which really bored me out, so i moved my interest to physics.
Incidentally i was drawn back to computers for playing games(not programming), students exchange lot of pirated games. My curiosity with the computer was back when one of the games was not working on my dads PC. I had to learn about exe, dll(apparently games needed many of these strange little files), Direct X, opengl, screen resolution, and lot more stuff.
Before i knew it, many of friends needed my help to troubleshoot their PCs, which game me lot of PCs to do my hardware/software experiments with :). And i gradually moved myself to programming again.
My final year CS projects was a warehouse management system using RFID and Java. From Logo to Java it took me 10 years, it may be a slow growth according to HN standards, but teaching kids the wrong stuff will really turn them away.