The first time, the installer installed the French version. I thought it might be some kind of fluke or I'd missed the language option. I redownloaded/uninstalled/reinstalled.
The second time, I had the Russian version.
Microsoft isn't making it easy for me to speak their language.
It installs a dozen localised shortcuts as well as English, any of which may pop up when you press the start button. Look in all programs in your start menu to find the English version.
Funny how much sense that makes in a twisted way. I was thinking that they had some kind of functionality that had you attach text to a keyboard event to explain it. Alas.
GraphicsWindow.DrawText(x, y + 320, "Press to stop game")
It's just a ... feature.
Edit: and the key they hooked up "stop game" to was not space, it was escape :(
Though I began with GW-BASIC on MSDOS 6.22 way back, but...
I would like to see a similar poster with a poor kid shown running linux on an old donated PC (because he can't afford one that runs vista/7) and playing with Python in bpython.
Doing much more than what he/she can do in Small Basic and learning something which would actually get him some money in future if he/she goes in the right track.
I wonder if this is case-sensitive too, I dont like the "To", "EndFor". The title of the current script - "Tetris - Imported", is so confusing, I see no tetris anywhere, all I see is something done to the poor turtle.
I also wonder what is the default direction of Mr. Turtle, I just can't guess what would be drawn.
I would like the kid to know that he needs not know wtf is ".NET", teach programming, don't advertize to them. Let them create their own .net if they want to.
Its in the right direction, I remember learning qbasic on dos it was a great way to get started and then sadly I graduated to visual basic. Which was a good place to start ;) I can't even read it these days but we all start somewhere.
Ironically, I think it would improve software quality these days if you were required to refactor your subroutine if you wanted to insert more than 9 lines of code somewhere.
1. The buttons on the ribbon are insanely large. Almost to the point I think I would be annoyed with this back in 6th grade. (I'm not 6 years old!)
2. The description of the move command is very technical. The same person that is writing docs for MSDN should not be writing docs for kids. (Seriously... "moves the turtle the specified distance")
Especially with the semi-graphics, semi-text mode. Line here, line there - you get the picture. I've got buddy back then who was able to write a whole BASIC application that draws Michael Jackson (yes there was Take One back then, but he wrote a 24kb code doing that).
Anyway... QBasic was fun too, and the MS-DOS one somewhat.
Anyone here actually have their first programming experiences with a "kid" language? I know I started on regular "adult" BASIC, then moved on to C and C++. No hand-holding anywhere, and I never found it to be too difficult.
So personally, I'm wondering what the value is here.
My first programming experience was with this shareware Mac app called GameMaker in the mid-90s. It let you make card-based adventure games. I ended up meeting all these kids on AOL back then who also used the app.
I'm still in touch with a lot of them, and it's amazing how many have become incredibly talented, successful, entrepreneurial folks (and we're all mostly in our 20's now).
The interesting thing is that this app was probably the worst way to learn programming. It didn't have operator precedence, functions, arrays, or many other basic features. It was a toy language in the most pejorative sense of the term -- not one carefully laid out for pedagogical purposes. I learned so many bad habits.
But that didn't matter -- the real important bit is that we all learned how fun it is to actually build stuff on your own and release it. I think that's the critical spark that makes the rest happen.
So many people have never experienced this joy and spend their entire careers only working on things other people have assigned to them.
Sounds similar to rm2k around 2000-2004. The language idea's sound similar and it was all ui based programming where you selected commands off menus rather than click them.
Part of the challenge though was overcoming the engine limitations as you could only display 20 pictures at a time but you were able to use sprites as images and change the sprite being displayed.
The appropriate analogy would be unsuitable to the audience. SB is targeted at kids. You shouldn't describe to a kid what the "graduation" really means.
When I was a little kid, I wrote programs in Commodore 64 BASIC (a version of early MS BASIC), and my subroutines couldn't even have names. GOSUB 1060 was an example call, and if you wanted arguments, you put them into globals; and you had two (count 'em, two) significant characters for your variable names.
I think the 8-bit BASIC maintains the abstraction level adequately close to the real underlying hardware. What SB does is to make a machine that is capable of things many orders of magnitude better and dumb down the abstraction to match (to a certain degree) what was available on the desktop computers of the 70's.
