Ask HN: Please share your experience teaching your kids to program

I remember one day in primary school a teacher had us play a game where we had to propose things to take on vacation. People would call out a suggestion, and the teacher would say yes or no.

The aim of the game was to figure out the rule. She said no to 'novel' and 'money', but yes to 'book' and 'currency'.

This is how I learnt loads of great magazines in the 80's in the UK with code in, you spent hours typing it in. It didn't work and you fixed it (that's how I learnt to debug!). The next week the corrections were usually published, good times.

I have explained to my daughters programming is basically a tool-belt that helps one build something they want.. like how paint brushes are simply tools to help create a painting.

For example, I was showing my 7 year old daughter the other night how she could automate her Roblox character with a simple AppleScript in order to move it every so often so that it could gain points while avoiding timeout from being idle, all while she could go and do other things around home. She smiled pretty big.

In short, IME showing how programming helps achieve an outcome has worked best. A general interest may compliment.

maybe this is just an outlier experience, but I deny that teaching (like telling somebody how to do something) is a successful approach at all. a widely underestimated ressource is that the learner wants to learn it. so, the best you can do is to show your owh profit from programming. then wait for questions.

and I mean wait. I have seen intelligent parents push their kids and really getting them annoyed and thus unwilling to learn stuff.

very good for questions you can not answer yourself is https://zen.coderdojo.com/find here, kids can (but don't have to) work on their own projects, ask highly qualified experts and -- even more importantly -- watch other kids working on their projects. plus: I have seen 6 year old kids presenting their project to 150 people at the coderdojo without even realizing what skill they acquired.

it boils down to 3 aspects: Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose

from my "teaching experience" with adults, giving the responsability to the learner is the important part. I hold seminars starting with an empty document. then I ask people to ask questions, otherwise the seminar would be over within the next 10 minutes. people instantly wake up and start to take responsability.

> until it could relate to her friends at school.

Perhaps that's the key for making something stick, beyond "immediate practical applications".

I learned programming as a kid because I played videogames, and started dreaming about making my own. But at the same time, I also had people I could talk to about it! At age 10, my cousin and I were constantly discussing how to make StarCraft and Fallout better. At age 13, when I first picked a C++ book (after prior failed attempts of other people to expose me to Basic, Pascal and VB) with intent to learn gamedev, I had a friend at school who decided to learn C++ as well. Over the year, we've managed to drag a third person into learning to code, and another one as a spectator to what turned into years of trying to one-up each other in doing shit in OpenGL.

And then I got on-line and discovered a local gamedev community, where again, I could participate in mutual showing-off.

Point being, as I re-evaluate my early years of coding, I notice I always had someone to talk to who could relate, or at least be impressed (real!impressed, not fake "I don't understand or care about any of this but go you!" parent!impressed). Looking at all these stories here about programming to automate homework - which presumably also impressed classmates - I'm starting to wonder if this isn't a necessary condition for a kid to get into programming.