(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Little Wizard is a development environment for children. It is intended to be used by primary school children to learn about the main elements of real computer languages. Using only the mouse, children can explore programming concepts such as variables, expressions, loops, conditions, and logical blocks. Every element of the language is represented by an intuitive icon, making it easy to learn. Little Wizard works under Linux and Windows 2000/XP.

Run via Menu->Utility->LittleWizard ,or by typing littlewizard on the commandline.

http://littlewizard.sourceforge.net/
http://littlewizard.sourceforge.net/tutorial.html
http://people.debian.org/~kaol/lw/tutorial.html

These are the latest example programs for littlewizard. Extract the attached archive to /, & they will be saved in /usr/share/littlewizard/examples directory. Then if you run littlewizard, and then open one of these files, then you can run it by clicking execute.

Great News - I hope the kids in the cybercafe start using this.

If I was learning programming, I would start with this. Even has elements of Logos turtle graphics . . .

many thanks

hi lobster,

do you know, (or anyone else that has dloaded this), if young children find it easy to use?

I've uploaded the latest release candidate of lwizard. This was compiled on puppy3, so it should run on pup3 versions without needing any other libraries. However when I tried running it on pup2.16, I just needed to add 2 extra libraries.

So anyone wishing to try on pup2xxx, just extract this attachment to /.

And people think C is confusing? The screenshots make my head spin. But maybe I'm just tired. I'll have to download it and give it a try over break. Might be fun.

hmm competition for Scratch...

scratch looks easier to use....

muggins wrote:hi lobster,

Do you know, (or anyone else that has dloaded this), if young children find it easy to use?

You need highly motivated and able teachers to teach programming
(that does not mean programmers - most who would scare kids

Scratch is available for Linux (beta last time I looked) but I feel it has some way to go
Programming is not easy for kids because it involves small rewards for
a great deal of effort

Even something simple like HTML is a lot of effort
if Facebook offers a free web page

However media intensive and social networking programming languages will evolve. As of yet I am not aware of any.

This is something that would be good to include in the next ecopup (the version of puppy used at the cybercafe), and for what it is the size is negligeable.

Maybe I was a strange kid, but I took to programming straight away when my mother (a teacher) brought home the school BBC Microcomputer to keep safe over the summer when I was 7.

I'll have a squizz at scratch. I did see an interesting java development environment, for kids, on freshmeat last week, but when I went back later on in the day to have another look, it had disappeared. And of course I'd neglected to write down the web address.

Yeah, what we need for kids is a language where, if you move the red block over here, this happens, whereas if you do this, ...etc. I think the closest I've seen to that sort of thing was squeak, but I'm dizzy like Pizzasgood, when I've tried Squeak.

Ecomoney,

have you looked at installing Leocad? It requires a working openGL installation, and the pieces required is quite large, (11M), but it would be good to have it installed on a couple of computers at your centre, rather than in an .iso.

http://leocad.org/

Hi muggins, our Rage II graphics cards dont allow for opengl at the moment, although its something we will bear in mind.

I have passed news of this to Slapshot, who is currently bringing out a new [url=www.edupup.org]edupup 2.0 beta

I've upgraded the 1.2.0rc2 release to stable 1.2.0.

Uploaded v1.2.1.