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

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

#181

Post by TeMPOraL »

ransom1538 wrote: post #94
colinmhayes wrote: post #9

Your kid is 7. I'm pretty sure hat I was eating dirt when I was 7. If he has showed you he's interested in programming then go ahead, but make sure you're not projecting your own interests onto your kid. It'll lead to resentment in 7 or 8 years.

Meh. My kid will leave the house able to program at the pro level. If they resentment me and open a bar more power to them. If the bar fails and they need to program to make ends meet - great. If I was a plumber, my kids would leave my house a certified plumber. If they want to be a lawyer instead - more power to them. Either way my kids leave with a skill.

Huh. I was going to object but I think you're right. The problems I know with parents forcing kids to do X when they wanted to do Y came from a) pushing X way too far (e.g. forcing a particular university degree), b) refusing to let the kid explore Y when they express interest for it, and c) resenting the kid for choosing Y over X.

So as long as one isn't forcing a skill exclusively, and isn't resentful when the skill doesn't stick, I'd say this is a wise approach.

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

#182

Post by TeMPOraL »

dorkwood wrote: post #171
rorykoehler wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do it with maths and languages. Why not programming? It is just another tool exactly like math and language.

Do many people grow up with a love of math due to this common practice, though? I would have thought the opposite.

That's more of a problem with the school system, which force-feeds maths (and other subjects, most of them hated just as much) into kids at a pre-set pace, with no regard for quality or making it interesting for the children. Which is why I'm also worried that including coding in the basic school curriculum is only going to make people grow to hate it.

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

#183

Post by TeMPOraL »

jgwil2 wrote: post #12
colinmhayes wrote: post #9

Your kid is 7. I'm pretty sure hat I was eating dirt when I was 7. If he has showed you he's interested in programming then go ahead, but make sure you're not projecting your own interests onto your kid. It'll lead to resentment in 7 or 8 years.

1.5 hours a day seems like an immense amount of time for that age, but if the kid is pushing for it, good for them both.

Kids have a different relationship with time. As a kid who was intrinsically interested in programming, 1.5 hours was a joke and a non-starter. I didn't really feel comfortable doing any coding until I could secure 2-3 hours of time for it, and I would easily spend 8+ hours on the rare days when my parents were otherwise engaged and didn't call me away to do other things.

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

#184

Post by RhysU »

jacobkg wrote: post #126
mywittyname wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A Texas Instruments programmable calculator. He read the manual, played with it a bit, then found out he could automate some of his homework. Then found out he could make simple games. Then fairly impressive games. Some thing never change. This is literally how I started programming too. "Hey, I can automate my homework" -> "Wait, I can write a program to play poker with all the time I saved by not doing homework."

Same here. Twenty years ago my dad gave me a TI-85 and told me I could program it. I remember being stuck for a while until I learned that “string” meant text. The first game I built was hangman, using “split mode” where you could show half the screen as a graph and half as text

Ditto on the 85. Stick with the 85 or similar. I later had a 92 which was sweet but the symbolic capabilities made it easy to not retain a lot of early calculus.

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

#185

Post by zelos »

Just to help set expectations: 1.5 hours a day is a lot for a 7 year old. That's probably not much less than a full school day of actually sitting down and learning.

I have taught my oldest son programming via Scratch, Python, a Raspberry Pi robot and bits of Khan Academy and Code.org. He started about 7 I think, but I've always been really careful to ensure that the interest in it is coming from him and not from me. He asks me to teach him and I do.

I think with all things like this, you have to ask what the opportunity cost is. What is he not learning because he's spending the time doing this?

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

#186

Post by richrichardsson »

jpm48 wrote: post #163
legerdemain wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the previous century of human civilization, computer games were primitive enough that their entire codebase would fit into a few pages of a magazine. You could play the game by manually retyping the codebase into a text editor.

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.

Exactly the same for me, I reckon a lot of 80s kids in the UK who had the right amount of attention span to do it were the same. I remember trying to input the massive list of hex for Tim Follin's 3 channel sound routine that I somehow managed to mistype a part of AND mistype the checksum so that it validated! Cue instant crash every time and disassembling was beyond me at that point.

In the 90s I got an Amiga and discovered the demoscene (basically showing off as mentioned in another comment).

Fast forward another decade and bored at my parents after finishing Uni I dragged my Speccy out of storage and managed to get the Tim Follin music routine running! And found an assembler and did some Z80 assembler demo effects for the lulz.

As you said: good times.

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

#187

Post by fiftyacorn »

colinmhayes wrote: post #9

Your kid is 7. I'm pretty sure hat I was eating dirt when I was 7. If he has showed you he's interested in programming then go ahead, but make sure you're not projecting your own interests onto your kid. It'll lead to resentment in 7 or 8 years.

I cant get my kids to tidy their rooms so no chance teaching them to code

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

#188

Post by rapnie »

Mayzie wrote: post #131
markc wrote: post #120

Didn't work: - BASIC, Ruby, Python, Java setups + intros, tutorials. - LEGO Mindstorms - Scratch, Squeak - Coding classes / camps Note that I "made these things "available" but never pushed. I'd set up the environment, show him to to edit and run the code, and pointed him to tutorials. After some time went by I'd show him the next thing. Rinse and repeat. Worked: A Texas Instruments programmable calculator. He read t…

> Worked: > A Texas Instruments programmable calculator. He read the manual, played with it a bit, then found out he could automate some of his homework. Then found out he could make simple games. Then fairly impressive games. That's pretty much how I got into programming, except rather than homework it was coding automation for a very repetitive video game I was playing at the time. Although in terms of time spent,…

TI99-4A long time ago. Programming a textual adventure game in Basic with my father (complete with matrix printer code printouts to make notes on). About a highrise appartment block with one unknown inhabitant being a murderer. Started with a crime scene. As player you had to find the murderer by walking around, talking to residents. You might talk to the wrong person and get killed yourself.

It was the combination of the game being thrilling and exciting, combined with the notion that you could make it ever better. Adding objects, people, discussions to be had, intrige, distracting side-plots.

My father had the lead in this, and in the evening he added stuff and surprises, that I could discover during the day, and then build further upon.

Also I think the fact that is was text-only rather than graphical helped keep interest, where my child's fantasy filled in the imagery (we went to graphical, Donkey Kong like games, later on. A different exercise, started when my interest in programming had firmly taken root. With graphical games you work on abstractions that aren't needed in text-based games and may be less easy/appealing for kids to take the effort to grasp).

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

#189

Post by thesauri »

Not a parent, but sharing my experiences as a kid.

GameMaker (https://www.yoyogames.com/get) was my gateway drug to programming. It's an environment for making games that covers everything from programming the game logic, to designing game "rooms", the sprites and sounds in one package.

I was introduced to the software by my father at roughly the age of 9 to 11 and we did the introductory tutorial together. After that, I continued messing around mostly on my own.

What in hindsight turned out to be quite brilliant, was that GameMaker supports both drag-and-drop programming and scripting. I was able to start off by using drag-and-drop, but quickly realized that scripting was the way to go for more complex logic. The combined environment made it a rather smooth transition, as I only had to add the scripting part to an otherwise familiar graphical environment.

It seems like GameMaker is still around, so that can definitely be something to check out. Making games is fun and I remember having great times in the community, too.

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

#190

Post by gfxgirl »

colinmhayes wrote: post #9

Your kid is 7. I'm pretty sure hat I was eating dirt when I was 7. If he has showed you he's interested in programming then go ahead, but make sure you're not projecting your own interests onto your kid. It'll lead to resentment in 7 or 8 years.

I am not a parent but I am a product of parents. I have friends that were pushed to learn a musical instrument. They hated being pushed as a kid but as an adult they are so happy to have been pushed. My father was a musician but his POV was unless I showed an interest he didn't push. I'm jealous of those who got pushed.

Similarly I have American friends that speak a 2nd language because their parents forced them to go to language school on the weekends. As kids they hated not being able to go play on Saturdays like their friends but as adults the love speaking the 2nd language. Conversely I have a friend who's parents sent him to language school but around 11 or 12yrs old he complained enough they let him stop. He still regrets it to this day.

I have no clue where the balance is but I don't believe it's 100% only do it if the kids want to side of the meter.

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