HP Prime or HP 50g

[parisse]

(03-20-2014 10:02 PM)Manolo Sobrino Wrote:  The fun part about teaching programming with a calculator is when you load the activities onto the calculator with your computer. You could be learning how to program it instead, but it's obvious that coding in the calculator has to be so much better... You can even code in a calculator with the emulator in your PC, how cool is that?

ANSI C hasn't changed since 1989 and probably everything in K&R will run for decades. We're talking about introducing programming to kids, not growing up and having auxiliary tools around, that is secondary. If school is about school things, what's the point of school?

Yes, programming in C is good because it is widely used in industry and you know the language will be available in the next 10, 20 .. years. But that's not important in the highschool teaching context because we do not teach to engineers. The idea of teaching a little programming in highschool is that in our modern world everyone should know what a test or a loop is. What's important here is that the langage must be easy to learn (otherwise the teacher will not be able to teach with it), and easily accessed, that is you can do a small programming exercice in the middle of a math course, that's why the calculator is prefered by many teachers to a more comfortable PC (despite the keyboard): just press ON then PROG and type your program (in the computer room you must wait at least 1 minute for boot, another one for login, another one to launch the programming environment etc.). In addition, you are much more confident that you will not loose your full hour in the computer room (that you had to reserve before) because the network does not work or the computers do not work because of a virus or someone who scratched the installation...
The easiest calc to teach programming is in my opinion the TI92/Voyage 200 : easy langage, qwerty keyboard, simple interface.