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Kids Programming Language ( KPL ) is the “new kid on the block” among beginners’ programming languages. Version 1 was released in August, 2005, and Version 2 will be released in the summer of 2006. KPL is freeware that has now (as of April 25, 2006 ) been downloaded over 80,000 times by users around the world. KPL’s user interface is available in 17 languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Greek, Polish, Romanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Danish, Czechoslovakian and Catalan. [http://www.K-P-L.org/ KPL’s website] is currently available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Norwegian and Swedish. All non-English translations have been provided by a global community of volunteers. Help with additional translations is welcome – and the translations are, by design, relatively easy to do. Jonah Stagner got the idea for KPL as he started to teach his own children how to program - and found that the choices of technology for doing that were extremely limited. Jonah, Jon Schwartz and Walt Morrison, all of Morrison-Schwartz, Inc. , have taken KPL from concept to globally successful product in less than a year. Their primary goal is to produce a programming language that makes learning to program easy and '''fun'''. KPL immediately captures a novice's interest by the ease with which one can write attractive multi-media programs with eye-catching graphics, music, sound effects, and animations. A secondary goal for KPL is to provide a modern language with many of the features of languages such as C++ , Java , Visual Basic or C# , to make the transition into those languages as easy as possible. KPL's syntax is similar to the those languages, and although KPL is not a completely Object-oriented Language (OOP), KPL version 2 will allow for definition of classes and their associated properties and methods, which provides beginning programmers with an introduction to OOP programming. To accomplish their goals, KPL's developers are building Version 2 upon the recent .NetFramework Version 2 which was itself released only in November 2005. KPL version 2 intends to be fully compatible with other languages that use the .NET Framework, so that runtime libraries can be shared in either direction. Although KPL was originally designed with 10- to 14-year-old kids in mind (hence the name “Kids Programming Language”), it is appropriate for beginning programmers of any age. It is currently in use by many older people who have downloaded it for themselves, rather than for their children or their students. KPL is suitable for a first programming course at any level of education, and is being used by primary and secondary schools and in universities in many countries, including the US, Britain, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Russia, Iceland, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Brazil, China, Guam, the Philippines and New Zealand. |
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