There are dozens of programming languages used today. You may try to start with a language like Java, C++, or Visual Basic - but their “syntax” (how commands must be written) can be very confusing for a beginner. You’ll also need to use a complex “development environment” like Visual Studio or Eclipse - they are great for big projects, but not for getting started.

Phrogram comes with dozens of code examples that help you start making your own programs right away. Or you can try products that minimize the code and use graphic objects in a “drag-and-drop” environment, like Alice and Scratch. They are great for very young beginners, of if you want your program to tell a story, but they won’t directly introduce how to do the things that working programmers do every day - and that’s what makes Phrogram different.

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CeeBot is a brand new concept with which you will learn programming while having fun. The programming language you’ll use is very similar to those used by professional programmers to develop their products. CeeBot introduces many modern concepts found in today’s most popular environments like C++, C# or Java.

After teaching you the syntax of CeeBot, progressive exercises will lead you to use important concepts such as variables, loops, conditional branching, functions, classes, objects, etc.

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Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

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A new computer program has been invented that allows anyone—it is aimed at children—to create interactive animations that mix pictures, sound and movement. The project, called “Scratch”, is the brainchild of Mitch Resnick and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

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