Re: Need C++ tutor for 10th grade student

["Eugene Gorelik" <user=1500@nabble.blu.org>]

 MIT has developed amazing programming language  for kids - 
Scratch<http://scratch.mit.edu/> 
It is unbelievable to see 7-year old kids writing programs. 

After that I am not surprised when I see 15-year old interns writing 
commercial grade programs for the companies during summer brakes. 

- Eugene 


On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 7:58 PM, Kristian Erik Hermansen < 
[hidden email]> wrote: 

> On Feb 13, 2008 4:41 PM, Eugene Gorelik <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> > I think Python would be a good language to learn programming. 
> > It has a very clean syntax and require programmer to write readable 
> code. It 
> > also has an OO part. 
> > The good thing about C is that student can learn memory allocation and 
> > system calls better than with other languages. 
> 
> Agreed.  Python is a suitable language.  My younger brother Peter and 
> I made a game using pygame with it.  He had fun.  However, C is a 
> *proper* language to understand how computer's work at the OS level. 
> It is sometimes hard to keep a kid's attention though with pointers! 
> 
> My first actual programming course was C++ in high school, and you 
> quickly learn that things can explode rather quickly.  I still 
> remember my first programming assignment.  Mr. Kaupp gave us a flow 
> chart for determining if it was a leap year or not.  We had to 
> implement code using the diagram.  It was a fun little first project, 
> but didn't really require the power of C++.  Basically just an 
> introduction to iostreams, initializing variables (our compiler didn't 
> do that for us!), math ops, looping, and logic.  It turns out that the 
> flow chart he was giving out to the class had one small error.  He 
> hadn't noticed it in all the previous years he gave the assignment.  I 
> wrote my program in such a manner as to correct for his error, and I 
> updated the flow chart for him :-)  However, I eventually got kicked 
> out of the class for circumventing the security system on the PCs by 
> writing a C++ program to open up the swap file and scan for the admin 
> password.  Well, it was fun while it lasted and I learned some 
> valuable lessons that day...heh.  I now understand that doing stupid 
> things just for fun is a very bad waste of energy.  It is easier to 
> destroy than create.  Breaking security is the easy part.  Making a 
> system unbreakable is the more challenging part and is nearly an 
> intractable problem requiring a huge knowledge base... 
> -- 
> Kristian Erik Hermansen 
> "Know something about everything and everything about something." 
>