KPL and Phrogram

What do you do with your kids for spring break?  Me? 

1. Take half the week off to play with the kids.
2. Join the Y so we can use the indoor pool and the rock climbing wall.
3. Rent all 6 Star Wars movies to watch them back-to-back.  That’s right, all 6.
4. Teach my 10 year old to code.

Say what?  What did he say?  Teach his kid to code? That’s right!

KPL (Kid’s Programming Language) is a programming language written on top of the 1.1 .Net Framework.  It has a striking resemblance to old school procedural VB, but has been abstracted mercilessly for simplicity sake.  Within 30 minutes, my kid had written a little app that makes an image of a UFO fly around the screen.  Awesome.

' KPL looks like this LoadSprite( "BALL", "BlueBall.png" ) MoveSpriteToPoint( "BALL", X[i], y[i] ) ShowSprite( "BALL" )

KPL has been deprecated by its 2.0 version, which for apparent reasons of intellectual capital or something, is called Phrogram.  Phrogram is a more object oriented implementation of KPL based on top of the 2.0 .Net framework.  Now, this stuff is hardly TCL, but the point is to take away all of the confusing parts of programming (like a complicated IDE) and make programming fun!

' Phrogram looks like this Declare ufo = New Sprite("ufo.png") ufo.MoveToLocation(x,y)

The Phrogram folks have succeeded at making their product a simple and pleasurable introduction to writing code.  I sure wish Phrogram had been available when I was 10 :).  I could’ve used it on my Atari 520ST. 

I cannot express the joy I felt in seeing my kid get into writing his first application.  He was so into it!  When he couldn’t find a bug that he had I took the opportunity to introduce him to the term “Pair Programming”. 

He said, “Gee, Dad.  That’s makes a lot of sense.  Two heads are better then one, because we both know things the other one doesn’t.”  Wow, from the mouth of babes, eh?

For the record, he knows nothing I don’t.  He’s 10.