I wrote an article before " Why the number of top programmers in Northern Europe far exceeds that in China?" ", talked about excellent software such as Linux, MySQL, Chrome V8, MineCraft, QT developed by Nordic masters, and analyzed the main reasons why there are so many top programmers in Nordic.
A reader @Venyuan commented that, in addition to the advantages of education, social welfare, and innovative atmosphere in the article, "European children's programming books have contributed a lot. Programming books decades ago are as eye-catching as current picture books." , the principle and code are taught very clearly, even silly children can understand it.”
Later, I asked for a few scanned PDF copies, and after reading it, I had only one word in my heart: Adorable!
These books have two particularly prominent features: 1. Start from the game 2. Use comics to explain, novel form
1. Start the game
Now many parents regard games as a scourge. Don't you know that many great masters' computer journeys started from games.
For example, Linus plays games on Sinclair QL, Monty, the father of MySQL, plays games on ABC80, and Iron Man Musk plays games on Commodore VIC-2.
After playing for a while, they felt that they were not satisfied, so they started to write the game themselves.
Computers at that time were very primitive. In the process of writing games, I had to get in touch with the underlying hardware and software. From then on, I entered the wonderful computer world, and it was out of control.
Many of these children's programming books are about games.
For example, this book "Write Your Own Fantasy Game"
And this "Write Your Own Adventure Game", what kid doesn't like adventure?
These beautiful pictures are very eye-catching even now, let alone decades ago.
There will be a code list at the back of each book, as long as you type in the code line by line, you can realize the game.
(The code listing is also very interesting)
As can be seen, the popular programming language at that time was BASIC .
However, it is impossible to make an adventure game/fantasy game with beautiful graphics only by relying on the codes in these books. These codes implement simplified versions, text interfaces, and keyboard operations.
In that era, this was enough to arouse the interest of the great gods. They liked to input the code in the book into the computer line by line to see the running effect.
At the age of 12, Musk also wrote a small game called "Blastar". He not only played it by himself, but also had a business mind. He sold the source code to South Africa's "Personal Computer and Office Technology" magazine, and the source code was also published in the magazine Go up and make $500!
In comic form, very interesting
For example, this book "Beginner Machine Code"
The following page explains the function of the chip
The following comic is using the analogy of a robot sending a letter to explain computer instructions.
In the picture, the robot breaks out of the wall, scaring the puppy to run around, which is very joyful.
The following is an explanation of how to save variables in BASIC, as well as the image metaphors of variables and values: grids and grid labels.
An excellent children's programming book should be fun, interesting, and step-by-step. This requires the author to know programming, tell stories, draw cartoons, and even understand a little child psychology. It is impossible for one person to gather all these skills. Teamwork is required.
And these children's programming books basically achieve these points, considering that they were published decades ago, it is very shocking.
There are also some comic books on programming languages in the domestic market. I have read some of them. Although there are comics in them as illustrations, I always feel that something is missing, especially the way of explaining is still biased towards adults, which is not suitable for children to read. .
I also published a " Half-hour Comic Computer ", which explained some basic concepts of computers in the form of comics, not a specific programming language, because I always felt that many things in programming languages are difficult to make a proper analogy, and it was published later. When the agency asked me to write a programming language comic book, I refused, fearing that it would mislead people.
Now it seems that my skill is not deep enough, and my brain is not big enough.
Can these "picture books" be used to teach today's children to learn programming? I also had this idea at first, but later gave up on it because there are several problems:
(1) The BASIC language used in the book is not popular now.
(2) These BASIC codes all run on ancient computers at that time (such as Commodore VIC-2). I'm not sure if they can run now. It would be too troublesome if you need to adapt the hardware.
(3) And most importantly, children nowadays have already seen modern games, and the games in the book are too simple and unattractive to them.
The times are changing, and now building block programming is very popular. There are many programming books related to Scratch and Programming Cat on the market. Write one article at a time to expand on this topic.
In short, Europe had excellent children's programming books decades ago. Their ideas are worth learning from. We hope to see similar excellent books launched in China as soon as possible.
(over)
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