Teaching Kids Programming with Free Programming Languages

“Alice
Alice is a creative “drag and drop” 3D programming environment that
makes it easy for kids to create simple animations for
story-telling, interactive games, or for sharing videos on the web.
It can be a great teaching tool since it is designed to introduce
students to object-oriented programming and at the same time allows
them to learn fundamental programming concepts. In Alice’s
interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to
create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard
statements in a production oriented programming language, such as
Java, C++, and C#. Alice is free and open source, and is available
for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

“Scratch
Scratch is an interpreted dynamic visual programming language that
has a main goal of teaching programming concepts to children
(preferably 8 and up) and letting them create games, videos, and
music.”

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