dietmom Posted April 20, 2011 Share Posted April 20, 2011 DS will be entering middle school next year--but I'd love to add a technical class to his list--since he loves learning about computers and of course playing on them!! :) Anyone have any advice about some great courses to start with to teach computer programming or other useful skills....he is already capable with word processing, power point, some spreadsheets. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
angela in ohio Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 I can tell you what I'm doing with mine. We are using Computer Programming for Teens as a general introduction. It is a fabulous book that teaches the basic programming terminology (loops, variables, arrays, etc.) with exercises at the end of each chapter. Then we are moving into C++ (we have the first edition, but this is the second edition, soon to be released,) though this C# course looked good when I saw it at our convention. At the same time, my girls are working on the Make: Electronics book, learning basic electricity and moving up to Arduino soon. They hope to get up to the point where their skills will merge with their programming skills and allow them to do anything they want in computers, robotics, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mothergooseof4 Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 :bigear: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boymama Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 We use Computer Activities Through the Year and More Computer Activities throught The year!!!!! It gives you great activities to do to learn how to use different features on the computer with Powerpoint, Excel, WOrd and others. They are fun things, bookmarks, photo layouts, graphs, conversions, newsletters, brochures, My kids have truly loved them. I give them a list of assigned projects for the year and the do one a week. SOme projects take more than one week. I give extra projects and they can do ever how many they want for a certain grade. Do them all for A+, do 16 projects for a B etc. Just a fun way to learn computer stuff. I got my books from Rainbow Resource. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wee Pip Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 I just taught a Visual Basic Scripting class at my co-op. VBS is different from Visual Basic, so don't get them confused. Why VBS? It's not a language - it uses an interpretor, so it's very forgiving:) It lays the foundation for programming, but in an easier, gentler way. And, it is a great resume builder: computer jobs look for people that can write scripts to automate tasks. This is a great first step for programming, but has very real, practical applications. Download Notepad++ (its like Notepad, but souped up for programming). It's a free, quick download. A longer download but with more features is Microsoft something-something, sorry can't remember the name. I think it was Microsoft Visual Design Studio. Notepad++ and the other one can both be used for several different languages. Alice programming (free download from carnegie mellon u) is supposed to be good, and fun. Web design is another direction he could go in: learn HTML and CSS (I wouldn't actually write a web site all in HTML, but it is handy to know). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wee Pip Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 Another thing: w3schools.com is a great site to play around with the basics of different languages, html, css, etc. I didn't like it quite as well for Visual Basic Scripting, only because it wraps it in HTML, and I thought it was better to use just pure VBS. But w3schools is a good place to experiment with their code, make changes, and instantly see what those changes did. My 10yo has enjoyed playing around with w3schools (we're a techy family). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
almondbutterandjelly Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 MIT open courseware has some basic computer classes (as well as not so basic) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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