I guess I'll share how I got interested in Perl and Programming in general. I've always played on computers. Mainly games, I actually remember QBasic, I wonder how many 15 year olds have even heard of it. Anyways. I learned some basic stuff in that when I was about six, but I never really got past displaying characters and making the computer beep.

In sixth or seventh grade I decided I was going to start a web page. I went to geocities, and started a site. I downloaded an HTML tutorial and went to work. The first things there were horrible, to say the least, but I eventually I got better.

Then sometime in seventh grade I got a TI-81 calculator. I thought it was really cool, I mean just like at the screen. I ended up learning you could do programs on it. I looked at source and at my manual, I picked things up pretty quick. (It's only basic after all) I started writing programs to make my math easier/less time consuming. I wrote one to solve the quadratic equation, etc. Pretty basic stuff.

In eighth, I learned some JavaScript. I didn't get very far with it, but I wanted to do some cool stuff for my webpage. I read, and did some basic stuff, mainly with math.

Then, at the end of eighth I started looking at perl. It looked really cool, and I decided to learn it, having no idea about real programming. I found this place, and have learned quite a bit, and that's where I am today, a year and a half later. Hope this helps you find a starting point. I think that either math programming, or web stuff is good place to start. I guess it depends on the kid.

elusion :

In reply to Re: Teaching The New Generation by elusion
in thread Teaching The New Generation by growlf

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.