Teaching Kids to Code: BASIC Reloaded

What it the first programming language you learnt? If you are my age, chances are your first programming language was GW BASIC that you learnt in class 5. But I soon learnt that to do anything serious I had to learn Pascal or Cobol.

Microsoft is now reviving the old magic with new technology fuelling the programming paradigm. They have announced – “Small Basic”. This programming language that comes with its own development studio is placed as the first programming language that is easy to learn and uses only only 15 keywords.

However, the technology behind it is state of the art .NET framework 3.5. The development environment is simple but has friendly features like Intellisense and context sensitive help.

The language and development tools are available for FREE: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

The tools are supported by forums and a team blog. To get the kids started you have a “Get Started Guide” too that can simply be printed and shared with students. For a country like India, that is known for technology prowess this tool will help schools with little budget to start teaching programming in early classes. So now, go and get those little angels an unfair advantage by teaching them programming early on.

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IndiMMS: The New Voice in Town

After being a blogger for a long time, I have additionally decided to venture out in the podcasting field. I am happy to announce that I am launching a new podcast series called “IndiMMS Kand”.. the podcast is proposed to be weekly and should be around 10 mins long..
If you wanted to bookmark the site where the podcast will be available, it is: http://www.indimms.com/
The preferred mode of listening to podcasts is through podcast catchers. And they need to be fed the RSS URL: http://feeds.indimms.com/indimms
You can find the inaugural podcast right here. Take a shot at listening to the inaugural episode (only ~3 mins)…
 






In this podcast, we cover:

1. The things we plan to be covering in the podcast
2. The naming of the podcast &
3. The inspiration for doing this podcast

Since this is just the beginning, I know that i may fall short of the quality that i wish to achieve. I promise to get better with time. Your feedback and comments on what u would like to see in the podcast or what can be improved can be mailed to me at: feedback@indimms.com
There were a lot of people who gave me feedback on the podcast early on and I would like to thank them for their time. To a new audio beginning :)

Technorati tags: indimms, technology, community, lifestyle, internet, trends