Teaching Kids Forth – Anna Liberty
An educator shares their experience teaching the Forth programming language to middle and high school students. The author argues that Forth's stack-oriented, concatenative nature provides a more fundamental understanding of computing than modern scripting languages.
Why it matters
It challenges conventional wisdom in computer science education by advocating for older, low-level languages to build foundational knowledge.
Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970.
I was ecstatic about this opportunity. I'm passionate about giving people just a bit more control over the potential locked up in the devices they carry with them every day. When people know more about computers in general and about making their own software in particular, whole worlds open up. This gave me the chance to pry the door to that world open for people who likely would have never discovered it otherwise.
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