Baltie 3

My first contact with the world of programming (2003 - 2006)

My first contact with programming was quite early - when I was 5 or 6, a single computer appeared in our kindergarten class, which was unheard of at the time. I don't remember much, but I know we were taking turns in front of it, "playing" Baltík / Baltie - a programming language and IDE designed for kids - it eventually became an inspiration for Scratch, which seems to be popular nowadays.

Created by Czech company SGP Systems, it featured a list of tiles with various commands you could drag-and-drop to compose sequences (i.e. programs) and then watch a little wizard executing them. There were many concepts I couldn't wrap my head around at that age (such as drawers representing variables, or robots/helpers representing functions), but I still had tons of fun with it (both in kindergarten and at home) - building houses, drawing shapes, embedding MIDI audio, etc.

Lessons learned: It is actually quite fun to give commands to a computer and watch it executing them precisely and tirelessly.