I'm looking for a self contained application that would assist in teaching basic programming concepts to 4th graders (9-10 years old).
NOTE: I'm looking for an actual application that would help in teaching them loops, conditional logic, etc. in a fun and interactive way. I'm a computer engineer and know Python, Ruby, Perl, and C among other languages, and very well could teach them one of these languages, but I wanted to teach them more about the concepts rather than how to code in programming language X.
I've found but never used any of the following packages:
free
- Logo
- Scratch
- Alice
- Hackety Hack
- Livecode (both free and commercial) See Wikipedia
- Processing
- Karel + xKarel
- Turtle Academy
- REBOL
commercial
web based free & commercial
As you can see, there is a huge selection of choices (these are what I found in ~30 minutes of searching). Which of these would be well suited to getting my kids off the ground and interested in becoming code monkeys?
Requirements:
- Should teach the concepts rather than be language-specific
- Must be interactive
- Commercial or open source is acceptable
- Should run in Linux (preferably Ubuntu or Fedora)