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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?

#31

Post by danenania »

I have a 6 year old daughter—got her a lego boost robot kit recently and she seems to be taking to the programming aspect. It’s cool to watch her experimenting. It has a nice graphical block based programming environment that is pretty intuitive for her with an ipad. Makes programming concepts very concrete/tangible.

It’s fun for me too since learning to program robots has always been on my bucket list. Chatgpt helps since even though it’s meant to be intuitive, you still run into various issues pretty often, and documentation is scarce. Sending screenshots to o3 works amazingly well to get unstuck.

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

#32

Post by aethertap »

SoftTalker wrote: post #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…

This is how it was for me too, but I actually think the world has moved out from under us. The environment today is way more complex, and it's a lot harder to be proud of little things when you see people crowing about how they "wrote this little app over the weekend" and it's already polished and full of features. I remember being proud of my little unit converter that ran on the command line, and even more proud when I got an actual window to show up on a screen (GUI programming took a long time to get into). These days, those things just aren't special enough to keep them engaged. I don't know if it's just too commonplace now, or too complicated to get started, but it doesn't feel the same as it once did.

My kids have finally gotten hooked by godot, after a few years of building up a foundation with simple programming assignments. It's fun to see them digging in for hours to make something, but man, it was a long road to get here.

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

#33

Post by kyriakos »

SoftTalker wrote: post #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…

I come from a similar background and learned to program long before getting any formal cs education. The problem I find with my kid now is that back when I was learning the spectrum of things you could spend time on a computer was vastly smaller than it is today. The distractions are there and it's almost impossible for adults to avoid, imagine children.

A pet project a child commonly wants to develop is a video game. Now imagine going on Google and searching how to build a game and what kind of results you get. How do you convince that child that he doesn't need the shiny flashy thing the ads are trying to sell and just needs to sit down and learn real coding?

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

#34

Post by tough »

Waterluvian wrote: post #30

8 year old badly wants to be an engineer like his dad. :’) Public school got him into Scratch so he was animating things. The high school robotics team I mentor has Lego robotics kits for their community outreach program. Those kits use Scratch. So I got him a used kit and he spends an absolutely ridiculous amount of time making robots that do stuff. This started at a very young age: we gave him access to a windows P…

Goboscript was on HN a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44026799

for when they grow up =)

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

#36

Post by Wowfunhappy »

wslh wrote: 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…

Have you used Alice recently, and if so what platform are you on? It seems to have become extremely crash-prone on recent versions of macOS, to the point that the school where I teach is planning to remove it from the curriculum next year, even though we otherwise like it a lot.

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

#37

Post by orochimaaru »

My 14 yr old wants nothing to do with coding. She hates scratch which I think spoiled the experience for her. I think schools should dump scratch and move directly to programming languages. Besides she’s at the age now where she doesn’t want the parents in her business.

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

#38

Post by joshuajooste05 »

Prompting, especially for code, is not too difficult of a skill to pick up, but the ability to A understand syntax and B develop the way of thinking is much harder.

I think the only way to learn to code is to really limit the use of AI (obvs can speed up some things, but never let him copy and paste from it)

I don't really think there is a substitute for encouraging him to push through without AI tbh.

When he eventually start's vibe coding, it will be like putting a v8 in a Ferrari instead of a VW golf.

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

#39

Post by chondl »

When my child was in the 9-12 year range we did programming with Godot. He liked building games so it maintained interest. Previously he had been working Scratch and the Godot editor was a much easier on ramp to building more complicated games than trying to do them in Java or Python.

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

#40

Post by margalabargala »

neilv wrote: post #24

> Knowing fundamentals is always useful, but learning to collaborate with an AI is probably the more important long-term skill. How difficult a skill is "collaborate with an AI" that it can't be picked up quickly at any time (and will be changing rapidly)? And how permanently stunted is a person who always "collaborated" and never had to think. > I’ve been focusing on fundamentals like logic, structure, and problem-s…

> And how permanently stunted is a person who always "collaborated" and never had to think.

How permanently stunted are today's programmers which have always collaborated with a compiler or interpreter, and never once written or even looked at assembly?

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