Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Fun programming-type apps and sites for newbies

DS6 has been enjoying this app:

http://light-bot.com/

Any more suggestions for similar apps or games for him or DD10? Both are totally naive re programming.

I've recently downloaded Circuit Coder. http://sweyla.com/circuit-coder/

It is about digital circuit desgin, gets tricky pretty quickly. But really good thought skills in it.

Cargo Bot is closer in sentiment to Light Bot with programming a machine to perform a function/solve a problem. http://twolivesleft.com/CargoBot/

Same company as Cargo Bot has a programming platform they used to develop it along with various game samples to experiment with. http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/

http://www.codecademy.com/ might make a nice follow-on from this; it goes into type-code-in mode, but has a similar hand-held structure.

http://scratch.mit.edu/ is not so structured, but avoids typing and is great fun.

Scratch and cargobot are great places to start as they teach the basic concepts before the "language". Code Academy is a good next step. Codea is also a lot of fun, but there is very little "teaching"--it's more explore as you go and if you don't know the concepts its hard to figure it out.

Another crazy place to start is retro, where I honed my programming on an AppleII. There is an emulator website: http://www.calormen.com/jsbasic/

Have to hunt down learning for it, but it is BASIC; there is something to quick turnaround experimentation. DS didn't have a strong pull to it. He likes doing tutorials. Recently tried Objective C, a very cumbersome language.

bumping this one too.

GREAT stuff in this thread. I particularly like the BASIC simulator. WOW, is that ever a blast from the past. Wonder if I can make my own punch-cards, too....