Everyone Should Learn a Little Programming

About a year or two ago, two prominent executives of large Silicon Valley firms suggested a need for everyone in school to learn some programming.  Programming involves creative thinking, mathematical operations in a real time format, ability to collaborate (since very little programming is done alone these days), and a wider range of brain based research ideas.

While this brought angst to some teachers, there are several platforms out there that can help with this idea.  One thing to remember, this does not need to be an in class project or idea.  It also works well with afterschool clubs or activities.

Most of the examples below involve a game format as this is the one that students are most familiar with and one that usually really interests them.  There are other formats as well.

 Google Blockly 

Scratch

Gamestar Mechanic

For pure programming there is PHP (Pre-Hypertext Processor) which is a web programming language, JAVA (Use it within Eclipse Environment for ease) and a host of other languages.