How To Teach How To Program

Slashdot has an article on how to teach kids to program. There's an interesting post in that discussion by John Harrison, who helped a 12-year-old kid write a video game in Java. The game itself is actually pretty fun (it follows in the grand tradition of galaga-style games), and relatively well done.

I started a similar project once when I was helping teach someone Java (in exchange, she was helping me learn chinese). We were going to do a pacman game, but we never finished. I think games are a great teaching tool, because they involve algorithms, data structures, and I/O. Plus they're fun, and therefore hopefully an end in themselves. What more do you really need?

I first learned to program because I was inspired by a guy in my high school who wrote games in Pascal. They were orange and black, because those were the only colors our monitors supported. The computer lab had about 20 computers, and at any given time, most of the people in the lab were playing one of this guy's games. I don't remember his name anymore though -- it would be interesting to see what he's doing now.

Gaming inspired me to learn about VGA registers (anyone remember "Mode X"?), interrupt handlers, palette rotation, trigonometry, vector algebra, assembler, C++, etc. I still have "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice", and "Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques" on my bookshelf.