Lynn Langit and Llewellyn Falco are very active in the programming world, chasing their passion of teaching programming to kids.  They have been using Small Basic successfully, for over a year now, to introduce hundreds of kids to programming.  As an aid to help understand the programming concepts, they have created very interesting Small Basic recipes. 

Recently, they have put together a website (http://teachingkidsprogramming.org) where they have been adding content to both teachers and students.  It’s really cool – check it out.

Marking the 300k download milestone, comes the 9th installment of Small Basic, the fastest and the best yet!  This version of Small Basic packs a ton of bug fixes, performance improvements and some of the most requested features. 

Download the new version here!

Firstly, the Small Basic compiler and runtime have been overhauled and the result is a big performance gain.  Some tight loop programs run up to 4 times faster than the previous versions.  This has been the primary focus of the release.

Next, we have new additions to the library. 

• We now have a Controls object that allows you to add Buttons and TextBoxes and react to click and text change events. 
• The Shapes object adds support for adding/modifying, animating and zooming text.  This is extremely useful for displaying and updating text frequently, like the score in a game.
• The Sound object now has a new operation, PlayMusic, which plays music described by a subset of Music Markup Language supported by QBasic.  An example is: Sound.PlayMusic("O5 C8 C8 G8 G8 A8 A8 G4 F8 F8 E8 E8 D8 D8 C4")

And then, there are the bug fixes.  I won’t go into the details but there are a ton of fixes.  An important update is the change in the default extension for Small Basic documents.  Small Basic documents get a default extension of “.smallbasic” instead of “.sb” to avoid conflicts with MIT’s Scratch.

Last, but certainly not the least, is the support for right-to-left languages and the first localized language in that series is Arabic.  Also included are Dutch and Polish versions, bringing the count of supported languages to 15!