-=> Quoting Steve Ambrosini to Bob Anderson <=-
 SA> My aim is to keep it as simple and entertaining as 
 RP> possible.  Creating video games, problem solving programming.  One 
 SA> could even tie all this in with almost any other course.
 RP> What I always found fascinating, and eventually got me into programming
 RP> full-time, is a kid can start programming at an early age and 
mmediately
 RP> begin learning "marketable skills". Not "put up with all this seemingly
 RP> irrelevant and tedious material now, so later on you can enter a college
 RP> or university and learn a lot more seemingly irrelevant and tedious  RP> 
material, so that one day you'll get a job and spend six months to a  RP> 
year training _specifically_ to do that job."  
Hehe, I just finished two master degrees that did nothing more than give me a 
piece of paper that tells everyone that I know this stuff (I knew 90% of it 
before, I could have taught a lot of the classes.)
 RP> Kids can be writing heavy duty stuff by the time they're 12 or 13,  RP> 
and it isn't unheard of for a 16 year old to be hired right out of  RP> high 
school (as happened last year to someone in the Quick BASIC  RP> echo)... or 
at least begin making some part-time earnings through  PR> programming. 
Be careful with the use of the term "Hard Stuff", that seems to scate off the 
stoggy teachers who want to defend their cut & dried curricula.
 RP> I look at it as the ultimate game, myself the opponent. Too bad it's so
 RP> difficult to impart the excitement of programming beforehand so kids
 RP> can see past the tedium of learning a list of key words and data 
pes...
I recall the obsessive quest to beat the computer only to result in giving 
the computer exactly what it wants (-:  Programming now has far more reaching 
results than a print out or screen display/answer.  HTML, CGI, homepage, 
JAVA, etc are all immediate results that students can see int he real world.  
Some may be interested in creating video games, but I think that that will me 
a minority.
That is where creative program development can come into play.  It can be 
exciting for the beginner but as long as the administration and tenured 
teachers claim that all it is going to do is turn out programmers, it is not 
going to go anywhere. 
The best part is that programming is not just a single department course. It 
far reaches into all subjects. That is probably why so many people cannot 
understand our entheusiasm about it.
--- DB 1.58/003138
---------------