This blog post is a work in progress. It will start light, but it will grow as we collect testimonials. Please add to it by leaving comments below. Please include the age and grade of the child and then a paragraph that explains how well the student was able to learn Small Basic. It can be a story, an example, or in any form you'd like. We'll list the youngest students at the top. We're looking for students age 1-13.
Ray FAST's son, age 8, 3rd grade:
I taught my little one the concept of DLL. Now he understands he needs the dll and .exe to run a SB program. It wasn't too difficult for a 3rd-grader to grasp the concept :)
Math Man, at age 9, 4th grade:
I am 10 years old. I went through the first few Curriculum Guide lessons with another classmate and a teacher when I was 9, but after that, I just felt like going at my own pace, so I went ahead and self-taught myself the rest of them. I was doing around 3 or more lessons a day, and it was very fun seeing the results of what just a few lines of code could do. I decided that it got boring just copying those already written programs into the Small Basic UI, so for every lesson, I tried to make my own program using what I had learned from all the lessons I had done. I was making programs to draw a man growing chicken pox, have the user control the turtle to eat apples, and other miscellaneous things. Now, from all that I have learned from looking at others' programs on the Small Basic forum, I have memorized basically all the objects, properties, functions, and keywords of the Small Basic language and how they are useful. In fact, I have actually learned what the sine and cosine functions can do while writing programs. I have been monitoring the Small Basic forum for a long time, but I didn't have an account here until a while ago. I like helping with others' problems on this forum and writing miscellaneous programs.
Michael Scherotter's son, Alex, at age 9, 4th grade:
This past week I had a great time teaching my 9-year-old son Alex and 9 of his friends computer programming in my home. I used Kodu Game Lab and Small Basic, two free tools created for kids to learn programming.
My son Alex, age 9, wants to learn about computer programming so I decided to try something fun – to teach it to him. In my day job, I explain and demonstrate Microsoft’s software development technologies and I’ve been programming since I was about ten so I think I know what to do. I wanted to do something really fun for Alex, and kind of adventurous, so I invited 9 of his friends to join him and next week I will be teaching a group of 8 boys and 2 girls programming in my home on my dining room table. Each camper will be bringing their family computer...
Small Basic is an easy-to-use version of the BASIC language that I first learned to program with on Radio Shack TRS-80s. As Lou Reed said, “it’s the beginning of a great adventure”. We started out with learning about the Small Basic programming environment, and got familiar with the idea of statements, properties and how to write code and run it. We were also able to cover variables, conditionals, and loops with a number of exercises along the way where the campers experimented and tweaked their programs until they had something that might make the other campers laugh.
Then we got to the turtle. Small Basic has a “turtle drawing” mode where you can enter commands to make a turtle move and draw with just a little code... Turtle.Show() Turtle.Move(20) Turtle.Turn(45)
That’s when the kids lit up. They saw that their actions with code made drawings on the screen. I then introduced the idea of the loop that they learned earlier and they started to make designs with repeated turns and moves. Once I showed them that you could add color and change the turtle’s speed, there was no stopping them. At that point, the decibel level in the room rose exponentially as the campers created programs and showed them to their friends. This was big fun! Take a look.
Mark Derksen's son, age 10:
Thanks to Small Basic, My son (10 years old) has taken his first steps as a developer. His enthusiasm proves to me, you are on the right track!
As a .Net developer, this make me a very proud father.
AirWaves, at age 11:
I started using Small Basic when I was 11, around two years ago, and I was amazed at how simple coding actually turned out to be. Learning a language like this is probably the best step one can take in their path to learning more advanced languages. Since then I have learned 5 other languages, but I can still look back at how far I came, and remember the good old times.
Thanks Small Basic for launching my life into a better direction.
Fred Postnov (Russian), age 11, 5th grade:
When I was 9, I was a real computer gamer. My dad taught me some 3DS Max, and I really liked making entities and space ships. But one day, I realized that perhaps video games are created somehow, and I asked my dad what was the secret of programming. My dad said that he knew almost nothing except Basic. He told me it was very old, and stuff. But I asked him: can you please somehow show it to me?
He found the compiler in a few days. And however Basic was small and easy, I still felt like a god of possibilities. Later, when my grandfather found out I was actually programming, he called us on Skype, and he told us he found an awesome program on the Internet (Smallbasic), and gave us a link. When I downloaded it, I didn't quit my computer for days, because I was programming.
Gungan37, at age 12, 7th grade:
I learned Small Basic when I was 12, while I was in 7th grade. I can remember the feeling I got when I found Small Basic on the Microsoft Download Center. I read the description and immediately downloaded it. I showed my parents the “Hello World” program I made and kept on going, next writing a Fahrenheit to Celsius converter. In a couple of years, after mastering Small Basic, I went on to C#. I quickly picked up C# by looking over code by Litdev, a Small Basic extension developer and community contributor. Within a year of that, I learned x86 assembly (picking up some C and C++ along the way), then Visual Basic, TI-Basic for calculators, J# and Java. Now, I am a 10th grade and am working on an operating system, CM-DOS, which is in C# and assembly language. Without the Small Basic Language and the very helpful community (such as Litdev), I would no doubt be an OS developer and programmer today. Thanks guys!
Amir CPS (Indian), age 12, 8th grade:
I am Amir a 12 year old 8th grade student from India. The story began when our school organised a visit to Microsoft India centre last year. A guy from Microsoft gave us a presentation how small school children can easily learn the concept of "Computer Programming" using Small Basic. Now Small Basic is being taught in our school instead of "C++" which was like a nightmare for us and i used to think that there are pre-defined codes for every single task i was wrong though. Thanks to Small Basic it helped me to learn the "ABCD" of programming and now i can transform my imaginations right into the computer program.
Creative One, at age 12:
Flostian, at age 12:
I'm now 13 and I startet programing when I was 12. I first startet with an easy German language (because I am a German), but it had a lot of functions, which it does not explain. Because the language was German, there wasn't many people who were using it and could it explain to me.
I started to code in Small Basic.
It's really fascinating to code things that seem to be very easy and operations you usually do automatically in your mind; because it's really funny to see how bright such a simple thing can be. And of course it's a wonderful feeling to see a program working if you had spent a lot of time writing it.
Noah Buscher, age 13:
I am 13 years old, and I think [Small Basic] is a great way to get kids and adults alike into the world of programming. I think that the simple UI makes it easy to focus on the code, and not the hassle of some more advanced languages.
Zock77, at age 13:
I have been wanting to program since I was around 8 years old, but all the languages I found were just too big of a step. (Even with a bigger brother who knows almost all of them.) But then my Dad found Small Basic, and I have been programming with that. I started at 13 (I'm 14 now). Now I'm just stepping into Visual Basic!
Joman Mied, at age 13, 8th grade:
I had been looking for programming software since I was 12 (grade 7), and I found Small Basic when I was 13 (grade 8). I worked through the tutorials one at a time, and because of the language being easily comprehensible, I caught on fast! To this day (grade 10), I am still learning new things about it, but I am able to make some cool (but simple) programs. I love how Small Basic uses a language close to English; easy to use "psuedo-code" if I forget something. Small Basic is a great first step to programming, and I am so glad I found it!
Please keep the testimonials coming! Leave a comment below, with...
- The student's age and grade
- A story, example, or other explanation of how the student was able to learn Small Basic.
The only other guideline is that we're looking for tesimonials about students, age 1-13. (This was updated from age 1-12 because we saw that we have many active 13-year old contributors.)
Thanks!
- Tall Basic Ed