Which Windows program to use to introduce 6 year old to programming? Best program to teach LOGO or BASIC with graphics?

Get an old machine and load DOS 6.1 on it.

i don’t think you should introduce someone to programming before he even knows how to read and write.

@ragingloli i don’t think you should introduce someone to programming before he even knows how to read and write.

Six year old kids can read and write – mine could at three and four. My eldest daughter was programming in pascal at seven.

Are Logo and BASIC even used anymore? Give the kid Photoshop instead.

I don’t know a damn thing about programming, so I don’t know if this link is relavent, but I figure I’ll share it anyway. If it isn’t just disregard my post.

There’s VisualBASIC. PnL knows about it.

You might want to start off with something like the LEGO robotics set—already a familiar brand, has a simple programming set, and as a bonus, you get that real world feedback of making something actually do something.

What? Their six!
Teach them how to play soccer.
Or take them to the park and run around with them!
Let them have fun while they can.

@simonPARASITE Let them have fun while they can.

Why do you assume that for some kids learning to program wouldn’t be fun?

I learnt programming from QBasic.. I don’t know if that’s still around but i think it was just the right difficulty-level. My college teaches beginners in Lisp, mainly because there are no variable types i think – although i find lisp unnecessarily complicated.

I dont think the choice of programming language is all that critical, just grab what you’ve got laying around, python would probably be a great easy language to start with (and freeware too).

Hackety Hack was pretty awesome for learning Ruby. Unfortunately the guy writing it gave up on doing any my work under his name and deleted all his sites.. All his websites and projects vanished. Luckily Hackety Hack is now on github. You can get it here.

Ruby is a fantastic language to learn.