Yesterday was Girl’s day and our office hosted a few girls from schools in and around Munich.

We used Kara to teach them a little bit about programming. You can create finite state machines to control a bug which runs around and tries to solve different problems. The girls did much better than I expected and finished all the exercises we thought would be enough for a whole day before lunch.

Without much preparation I decided to teach them a little about “real” programming and Ruby because there is a Ruby version of Kara which lets you write Ruby code to control the bug.

The experiment was very successful. The girls solved all the problems again, this time in Ruby and from their feedback they really enjoyed it.

A couple of years ago I taught a programming course for kids at the Volkshochschule in Karlsruhe. At that time I used Perl (it was a loooong time ago and I didn’t know Ruby then) but if I ever do this again I will use RubyKara.