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Several accounts that tell so much
(These accounts date from Spring 1998)
Antoine Duchâteau
I’ve particpated to Kids’ activities for several years. I’ve learned Logo, Pascal, Assembler and English ; from the simpliest to the more complicated programming language. I’ve learned to draw squares and circles, trees and houses, to command a robot, to make it speak, to write programmes, to divide them into sub-problems in order to resolve them with a limited number of tools, despite the restrictions imposed by the programming language.
For me programming has always been a kind of construction toy, like Lego.
I’m just 24 years old, I’m a civil engineer and researcher at the IRIDIA (ULB) for two years, I’ve never encountered a problem with a computer in my training or in my job.
I still use it as I used to during my Kids’ years.
Martin Hou
I could barely read when I met Mr Computer for the first time. I didn’t know anything about these machines, only that they could enable me to draw and to write. Games were also part of it, but unlike the others I was not particularly interested in these, maybe because they were still so rudimentary at that time.
At the Kids’, I’ve always been welcomed as a king. When I think about these first contacts, I’m convinced that there’s nowhere else such a computer club, where each trainee is a one and only person. Teachers care about everyone, they give individual advices, but manage to create a team spirit. Words like trainees and teachers do not fit the spirit of the Kids’ ; it is not a school at all, the Kids’ is just the contrary ! Each ‘trainee’ express his creativity freely, without constraint ; the ‘teacher’ helps him to free his creative potential thanks to this great tool named Logo, a programming language based on a cute little turtle.
Nigel Couldrey
I began LOGO when I was 4 years old with a turtle before I learned to read and to write. Commands enabled me to draw with a pen on a board lying on the floor.
From this simple series of commands, I evolved and then began on a computer with LOGO as soon as I could type. Until I was 13, I came on a weekly basis and also during the holidays.
Since a year and an half I’m boarder in England and I can’t come at the Kids’ Computer Club during the school year. My current computer sciences teacher appreciates the theoritical bases that I got at the Kids’.
Thanks to these years of efforts and thanks to my parents and teachers, I can use a computer naturally and I have a good understanding of the how and why it works rather than being a simple passive user of a given programme.
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