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Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

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Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#11
post #4

I have run a codeclub for 10 years. Here’s some quick thoughts: - Make them curious, if they are curious they will teach themselves. Example: don’t tell them what a for loop is, make a project where they really need it, but let them first to write it very verbosely without loops, then they will almost invent it themselves and be relived when you teach them (same style can be applied to most things) - make projects th…

p5 first sparked my interest in programming 10+ years ago when I was in secondary school. Definitely recommend.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#13

My teenagers have zero interest in programming. They like just about everything else other than programming. They both have the ability, but it’s not what they want to spend their time doing.

For what it’s worth I hated programming as a kid and was not interested in it and didn’t pick it up until well into university. A couple of my siblings followed the same arc.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#14

Touch typing is fun amd magic for kids. 9 more keys left out of 26 for my kid. I clearly see her developing muscle memory faster than I did myself.

Ditto with my daughter. I don't really know if this helps them get into programming but she now types faster than me with much better accuracy.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#17
post #3

I think it's best to start close to the goal and move into problem-solving once something is up and running and needs improvement or optimization. Focusing on CS fundamentals isn't always worthwhile, unless there's a genuine interest in computer science or math olympiad style problems. Today, we can operate at a higher level since most core algorithms are already available in libraries and frameworks. Just my two cen…

> if your kids aren't very interested or ready for that kind of knowledge now

Roger that. I showed some Python magic to a pair of 10 year (or so) olds, they weren't too thrilled. Also Lego (my childhood magic) didn't do much for them. But they liked Minecraft well enough...

One of them is now an engineer, slinging C and Python as needed.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#18
I taught kids how to code for several years, both in person and through a website that taught Python to ~500k kids. My eternal advice with teaching CS is to delay abstractions as long as possible. Teach them how to draw a circle on a canvas, then get them to move the circle to different parts of the canvas, then get them to draw multiple overlapping circles/rectangles/etc. Once you've got that down, make a bouncing ball animation, simple games, and so on. Most kids don't really care for leetcode problems these days, so it's best to stick to things that are visual, creative, and instant-feedback (i.e. games).

This was a really useful realization when I was teaching kids to code in person for ~5 years. I started off teaching Java with an abstraction layer (https://www.bluej.org/), but I found that many students would be intimidated by anything that ventured outside of the abstraction (e.g. just run `javac` on your computer with a `.java` file). My most successful students intuitively understood how to turn a text file on their computer into a useful piece of compiled code, or into a JAR bundle that they could share with others. They also used the various abstractions that were thoughtfully introduced over time - e.g. an IDE that gives you a run button, libraries like Firebase which enable some exciting multiplayer game options, and so on.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#20
Who guided you? If you're like me, nobody. I was exposed to BASIC as my first programming language, and I just started doing stuff that seemed interesting. My school offered a few "computer math" classes as they were called at the time, which I elected to take, but nobody pushed me into it.

Give the kid some programming tools and leave him alone. Be there for questions, and brainstorming if he wants it. Otherwise let him figure it out. He'll shoot himself in the foot, and maybe get discouraged but if his interest is deep enough he'll persist.

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