What, you're not teaching them TDD?!?!

That sounds like an awesome experience, Kevin.

I tried to get my little sister into software via HTML/web development. It worked well at first, nice and graphical and all that. But after she got the basics, she wanted to reproduce what she saw on the fancy professional sites. And back around 1999, when I was trying to teach her, there weren't as many great frameworks and toolkits available, not to my knowledge at least. So, she pretty much lost all interest after looking at her first few lines of JavaScript.

Small Basic sounds like a much smarter approach. Good luck!

A friend of mine has had moderate success enticing his nine-year-old into software development through Game Maker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Maker). I haven't tried it, but it sounds pretty clever. It lets you create simple games through UI widgets and as you want to add more complex interaction or behavior, you have to learn bits of GML, a built-in interpreted scripting language.

Hehe. No TDD for the 10 year old. I don't want to scare him away from programming. But once they are ready to move up to do some real development, I will introduce them to those concepts though. I don't have delusions of my kids becoming great programmers. Certainly, if they want to do what I do for a living, that would be cool. I'd love to teach them and learn from them. But I'd at least like them to understand what I do for a living. Writing simple programs with Simple Basic and Game Maker is a fun way to get them there.

A while ago, my son e-mailed me a program he wrote this morning. (He's home from school recovering from a tonsilectomy/anedoidectomy operation on Monday.) With Simple Basic he wrote some code that draws a little spaceship that lands on a landing pad, gets refueled then takes off into space. It was really simple but way cool. And the excitement in his e-mail was palpable. I love watching people learn. That's one of the reasons I teach part time. But when you can see that excitement in your own kids, it's even more satisfying. Thanks for the Game Maker link Al. Awesome.

Thanks for that, so simple yet so effective.

There is a slight problem though with the code above. It doesn't preserve the aspect ratio of the image. This leads to distorted images which no doubt entertain the kids, but at the end of the day they are distorted. So I took the liberty of changing the Sub to use an ImageList rather than a simple variable. The point being that you can then reference the dimensions of the original image for calculating a correct size change.

Pity they called it an ImageList (yes I know, the underlying implementation and all that) as it only seems to take a single image!

So for correct aspect ratios......

TextWindow.WriteLine("Welcome to My Flickr Picture Viewer")
TextWindow.ForegroundColor = "Cyan"
TextWindow.Write("What kind of pictures do you want to see? ")
TextWindow.ForegroundColor = "Yellow"
keywords = TextWindow.Read()
TextWindow.Hide()

GraphicsWindow.Title = "My Flickr Picture Viewer"
GraphicsWindow.Left = 0
GraphicsWindow.Top = 0
GraphicsWindow.Width = Desktop.Width - 20
GraphicsWindow.Height = Desktop.Height - 100
GraphicsWindow.FontSize = 18
GraphicsWindow.Show()
GraphicsWindow.MouseDown = OnMouseDown
GraphicsWindow.DrawText(10, 10, "You are about to see Flickr pictures with the keyword(s) '" + keywords + "'.")
GraphicsWindow.DrawText(10, 50, "Click in this window to begin. Click when you want to see a new picture.")

Sub OnMouseDown
  GraphicsWindow.Clear()
  GraphicsWindow.DrawText(10, 10, "Downloading...")
  Img = ImageList.LoadImage(Flickr.GetRandomPicture(keywords))
  IHeight = ImageList.GetHeightOfImage (Img)
  IWidth = ImageList.GetWidthOfImage (Img)
  ' do these here in case user resizes window
  GHeight = GraphicsWindow.Height
  GWidth = GraphicsWindow.Width
  HRatio = GHeight / IHeight
  WRatio = GWidth / IWidth
  If WRatio > HRatio Then
    GraphicsWindow.DrawResizedImage(Img,0,0,IWidth * HRatio,GHeight)
  ElseIf WRatio < HRatio then
    GraphicsWindow.DrawResizedImage(Img,0,0,GWidth ,IHeight* WRatio)
  Else
    GraphicsWindow.DrawResizedImage(Img,0,0,GWidth,GHeight)
  EndIf
EndSub

I may start adding SB stuff to my site, if I do (no promises) and I change this further, that is where I'll make the changes available.

OK, I relented. Here is another change. In my version, to centre the image, after

  Img = ImageList.LoadImage(Flickr.GetRandomPicture(keywords))

add

  GraphicsWindow.Clear()

and change the if statement to read

  If WRatio > HRatio Then
    IWidth = IWidth * HRatio
    GraphicsWindow.DrawResizedImage(Img,(GWidth - IWidth) / 2,0,IWidth,GHeight)
  ElseIf WRatio < HRatio Then
    IHeight = IHeight *WRatio
    GraphicsWindow.DrawResizedImage(Img,0,(GHeight - IHeight) / 2,GWidth ,IHeight)
  Else
    GraphicsWindow.DrawResizedImage(Img,0,0,GWidth,GHeight)
  EndIf

Thanks, Derek. The sample code I built with my kids was for fun. You've taken it to the next level. Small Basic is really fun. I hope Microsoft considers putting more resources behind simple, introductory programming languages like this.

Hey Kevin,

Haven't been doing SB recently, I got distracted by finally realising I could replace my personal edition of Delphi with Turbo Delphi. Wow, everything you used to have to pay for and then some!

Then I got distracted again (hah). Got a second hand pocket PC for a bargain 30 quid and duly discoverd Basic4PPC. Science fiction comes true, proper programming direct on the mobile device! Just wish the screen layout was consistent with the desktop IDE version. Sigh.

But what I was going to say when I started typing and got, guess what, distracted, is yes I know you were doing it for fun, that's why I said "took the liberty". But then, in a different way, I was doing it for fun too. Before I retired I was in the huge and complex end of software which is no fun at all. So it was great to get back to the sort of proggy you can do for fun, like it was in industry in the seriously old days (ie decades ago!).

Apart from that, part of me said, it's only a fun proggy but it is, despite that, really useful, so there are bound to be people out there who would be able to make use of my ideas too. So, I didn't want to keep them to myself.

One of these days I might re-invent Random Snakes & Ladders (70s and maybe earlier, don't know who had the original idea), definitely one for the younger users!