OSDev.org

See this: http://wiki.osdev.org/User:Aj. This guy claims that "I started programming at age of 5 using a simple starter guide (documentation)". Can a 5 year old child able to read documentation and develop programming logic?. I think 5 year olds even not able to understand and read documentations or guides.

Children already draw at the age of one. That they have no idea of what art, style or technique is doesn't mean they're actually doing it. I got a few demonstrations when I was three or four, I got a book - specifically written for children - when I was 5 or 6. I should still have it somewhere even though the software stopped working since Windows 95.

So no, I'm not surprised in the least and it probably says more about the culture you grew up in (whichever that is) than the person whose biography you tried "fixing".

Mozart was composing at the age of 5, and that strikes me as a more difficult task than computer programming. How many here could write a violin sonata?

Basically, you are accusing the guy of lying in his biography. That's not a very friendly way to interact with fellow forum users.

muazzam wrote:See this: http://wiki.osdev.org/User:Aj. This guy claims that "I started programming at age of 5 using a simple starter guide (documentation)". Can a 5 year old child able to read documentation and develop programming logic?. I think 5 year olds even not able to understand and read documentations or guides.

Why not? I mean really, wasn't there some news 3 years ago or somethin' about a 12 year old extending Einstein's theory of relativity and was recruited by Indiana University? Now that.
Prodigies are rare but not impossible. Or let me put it in a better way, "Kids, if given the freedom to choose their direction, the time, and the motivation to go ahead turn into prodigies".

Thanks for fixing my user page.[/sarcasm] You'll note that I provide some context on the wiki page and books like this were fairly commonplace around the time of BBC micro's and are easily accessible to a 5 year old. My main book was a big Usborne hardback which I still have somewhere in the attic. No genius needed - just the concentration span of a 5 year old who likes books and computers!

My 6 and 4 year old sons are already in to their computers in a big way. With the advent of things such as scratch, there's no reason why people can't get started earlier (as long as they get out and play with friends as well )

This has made me realise how out of date my contributions to the wiki are and that I should probably just scrub my user page...

Cheers

Hi Aj,

You seem to be naturally intelligent. Doing something like that at 5 is unimaginable for me. Everything I earned in life came at a cost - I couldnt even multiply 2 numbers properly till I was 10. May be it is a good thing , I learned to trust in God than in myself and work hard.


--Thomas

muazzam wrote:See this: http://wiki.osdev.org/User:Aj. This guy claims that "I started programming at age of 5 using a simple starter guide (documentation)". Can a 5 year old child able to read documentation and develop programming logic?. I think 5 year olds even not able to understand and read documentations or guides.

If the simple starter guide is made for 5 year olds, then yes, i would give it a try.

Inside our brain are some kind of mirror neurons for emphatic features for to store all stuff together with a good vibrations and otherwise we do not like to learn, if we are in an enviroment with a bad vibration, or if we feel an indisposition. I think some 3 years olds are able to learn first logic, if it is playable and in a friendly form. But i think the form of our older documentation have to be transformed in a more children like form. A lot of work later if it is maybe possible.

Dirk

Society doesn't generally expect much of five-year-olds, but most of them are capable of great things if they're programmed correctly (e.g. being taught to read and do simple arithmetic at an early age instead of waiting for school to do it). I've just been looking at one of the books from the days when home computers started appearing. The early machines were designed to make programming instantly accessible, and the way in was shown through simple example programs that any five-year-old who can read should be able to follow with ease, if they have sufficient interest:-
Having shown that example, the reader is then challenged to do the following:-

Write a program to add numbers to the variables in the program on the left so that it would print out the answers 100 and 1 on one line with a space between. Change lines 30 and 40 so that they print out the numbers, what you are doing to them and the answer, e.g. "7 times 9 is 63".

Bit by bit it arms the reader with simple skills and builds them up to be able to create more interesting programs with graphics, ultimately leading to games, and in those days simple games were a big attraction which gave children the motivation to work their way through this kind of book. It's also filled with colourful cartoons to make it look friendly, and it simply gets on with the job by showing everything through examples and never throwing too much junk at the reader before they need it. I would imagine that most dads would also have been heavily involved, helping to drag the child past any comprehension barriers.

I missed out on all that in those days because we didn't have the money to buy such a machine (everything we had went into sailing dinghies instead, so I wasn't in a position to complain). All my friends were obsessed with computers though, but only a few of them kept on with programming while the rest simply bought games to play instead. Over time, gaming became the main event and machines were designed specifically for that instead of for programming. With the PC, it was hard to find any way to program the thing without buying extra applications to run on them to do the programming, and the tutorials for using these things were not aimed at children any more - they were deeply boring and dumped far too much clutter on the learner up front. As a result, it wasn't long before most children knew nothing of programming at all, but the Raspberry Pi is partly aimed at bringing back the old days by making programming more accessible to children again.

There actually are fairly popular programming languages designed for children

When I was in school, we had computer labs with Unisys ICON computers. I certainly recall being taught LOGO at a young age, I was probably older than 5.. and it was arguably more-like "type this in, kids, see pretty graphics".

How does any of this impact you? And why are you editing AJ's User: page?

You'd think that a child would in no way be capable of understanding how to program, but it is well known that children are very adept at quickly learning language skills and abstract thinking. If you take it at more than face value, programming languages are basically the same as spoken languages; except there are far less rules.


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Coincidentally, I also began around the age of 5. Granted, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I first started by opening a few applications in notepad and copying / pasting different pieces together (which obviously did nothing but throw errors). In time though, I eventually discovered things like bat, js, and vb scripts floating around on my pc. By simply changing a few snippets here and there, I was able figure out how to make little popup messages and write simple conditional code; which was very exciting to me. After I trashed a few pc's though by messing with system files, I was banned from using a pc for sometime ;p

Then, at about the age of 7, I was finally allowed to use a pc again. It was around that time that I discovered Game Maker. That was like...my favorite toy. Over the course of 2-3 years, I made all different kinds of things. Pinball games, puzzle games, platform fighting games, a Harvest Moon-like game where you could steal vehicles and shoot animals; I even once made a shell that had animated menus using particle effects that could play music and videos. After that, I discovered C++, but it was so different from everything else I knew and grammatically complicated that I abandoned it and picked up Python. I spent most of my time learning how to use PyTk. Despite all this, the first time I actually became entirely fluent in a language was at the age of 13; where I learned z80 assembly for my TI-83+ calculator. Eventually, I got bored with that though and went back to learning C++ with devkitARM for the GBA. By this time though, I actually had a hard time wrapping my mind around high level languages; and I eventually shifted my attention to learning C; which became my second fluent language.

After 17 years of nothing but trial, error, and exploration, I've worked with Basic, VB, C, C++, C#, Python, Java, Javascript, Clisp, Ruby, Erlang, Lua, Z80 assembly, MIPS R4300 assembly, x86 assembly (not counting lesser scripting languages); and am still fluent in most of them.

But, it's a bit of a wasted obsession now. I've completely burned myself out. I constantly have to urge to be working on something, but actually looking at code starts to give me a headache after a while and I just blank out. Nowadays, programming has become nothing but a small hobby for me which I have no desire to pursue as a career.

I don't think age has any impact on whether someone can program or not (or any other skills for that matter), I believe a person's interest is enough, though of course the person needs to be able to read. Plus I believe when one judges others, the person doesn't show about others but about the person himself, even if you wanna ask this kinda stuff ask in a better manner.

I first learnt programming when I was about 8 using BBC BASIC for Windows which is like BBC BASIC except that it runs under Microsoft Windows. Before that I had tried Visual Basic but found it a but complicated (although I had no problem understanding it when I went back to it after learning BBC BASIC). BBC BASIC for Windows came with a nice tutorial for beginners and by doing one section every afternoon and evening, I mean actually doing it properly like by typing in the code oneself and completing all the "extra" exercises, I had no difficulty in understanding various basic programming concepts. After that the object-orientated approach of Visual Basic made perfect sense to me.

Anyway as a teenager I like C and I actually prefer it to BASIC because it is very powerful, but for object-orientated programming I find that Visual Basic is very powerful and so I haven't learnt C++ and in particular I don't like C++ because the way that it implements objects is not the way that I would have done it (and not the way that I did do it either when I actually did need to use objects in C and ended up writing a complete object-orientated framework without realising what I had done - no I didn't realise it because in my mind I was working with "data blocks" and it didn't occur to me until afterwards that they were actually objects!).