Quote:Originally posted by DJBlufire
I think one of the most important and hard to understand things about programming as a kid is that you have to start small and, probably, with a text console.

Back in 5th grade I was itching to program games too, and I got a C book. The language itself wasn't all that hard, but what really pissed me off was that I wasn't jumping into graphics and game programming right off the bat. I had no clue why I had to bother with consoles, printf, etc. I sort of dropped programming for a couple years after that because I lost interest/lacked direction... but I started going again once I found a class on programming in school (those are great).

[b]er... the Cliff's Notes: if you're going to teach a kid programming, either start with something graphical (metal, realbasic, something like that) or make sure the kid knows that you do in fact need to start small. I wish someone told me that. [/b]

That's basically the same thing that happened to me. I started with BASIC, but wanted something more mainstream. So I jumped into C, but I all I got done was "Hello World" and doing numbers. Quite disappointing.

I'm learning Java at school and I think I've gotten more done because of the incentive of grades. Maybe putting an incentive would help the kid if he was to learn a more advanced language such as C or Java.