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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

#41

Post by colinmhayes »

jedberg wrote: post #37
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.

As a counterpoint, I started programming on my own at 7 with no guidance. Mainly because my IBM PC booted into a BASIC window if you didn't put the DOS disk in. I asked my mom to get my some magazines from the library so I could copy the games in them. So it's not totally odd for a 7 year old (or I was odd, which is quite possible).

I started coding when I was 12, which itself was strange. I attended a top 10 engineering program and around half of the cs students came in with 0 programming experience. There's no rush. Let kids be kids, if they want to code great, just don't force it. And don't be upset when they burn out after 1.5 hours of extra work a day.

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

#42

Post by lmilcin »

ceautery wrote: post #11

https://appsbykids.org/ is a hastily thrown together site showing some of my work with kids. I've been running volunteer computer clubs at schools my daughters attend, pre-covid anyway. I've also run a summer immersion program for basic software design principles using the Scratch language for Girls Who Code. We've played with Adafruit Circuit Playground dev boards, written a "choose your own adventure" engine with P…

Yes, tinkering with existing program is really fun. I did this with his first ever project (which was a robot programmed in block language that is even simpler that Scratch) and made entire program for him, with him sitting by me and discussing how I am adding new steps to the program and what they are changing, each time running the program on the robot with another step implemented. Then he got his turn to have fun with the program.

We stopped with that robot after couple of sessions when he was able to program some functionality up to my specification. For example, there was no sensor that would say the arm was closed, so to preserve the worm drive I asked him to change all places in program where the arm is getting opened to instead close it first and then open for an exact amount of time so that it does not hit the limit, which he was able to do on the first try, which gave me confidence he more or less understands what the idea is.

Now, the games we do are getting a little bit complex (a lot of messages flying around), so what I do is basically write most of the code and shape the structure of the program and figure how do to some stuff so he doesn't get lost managing complexity. I make sure he understands what the things are doing and he modifies whatever he wants (and then we discuss what happened or how he can get what he wants).

I am now unsure whether I want to stick to some more complex projects or whether it is better to have more small but wide variety ones. For now what I plan to do is to throw a bunch of ideas and see which ones he is most excited about.

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

#43

Post by ed25519FUUU »

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.

The best thing we can do for our children right now is keep them AWAY FROM SCREENS!

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

#44

Post by boogies »

snaveen wrote: post #20
snaveen wrote: post #18

I have 2 kids 14 and 12. My 14 year old has started solving medium level leetcode problems (which I am happy about). Talk to them often about code, technology etc.One thing that helped IMHO spending a lot of time in solving math problems (AOPS) , which made think through hard problems and had to grind through solutions which took time. My kids love Big Bang Theory and anything that is geeky. I talk to them about the…

I have got my kids hooked on vim https://vim-adventures.com/

I used the gratis demo of that site to introduce a 7 year old to vi, and hoped I just might have been an accomplice to a world record when he successfully completed vimtutor afterwards. He now uses the skills to do his schoolwork in HedgeDoc (last week I taught him to make macros, which he uses for markdown headings and checklists).

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

#45

Post by lmilcin »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #43
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.

The best thing we can do for our children right now is keep them AWAY FROM SCREENS!

I spent a lot of time thinking about this.

In the end, I would rather be able to influence what my kids are using the screens for than introduce them to screens at a point in their life where I will have no say about what they are doing.

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

#46

Post by lordnacho »

I got my kid doing some minecraft python coding, but I wrote out the programs and walked him through it, and then let him change some constants. Those are the most obvious things that you can change with no experience.

I also gave him a first mental model of how it works. You have a genie, he sees you want to make a label called "height" and put a integer, 5, in it. He decrements it by 1, places a tower of the height, walks over, etc... until you have a 5,4,3,2,1 triangle.

But I don't try to push it too much. I think it's good at age 7 or 8 to be exposed slightly, but unless your kid is a prodigy it ain't gonna click for a while. We just want to marinate them gently for a bit until it hits them.

MC is good because he plays it a lot and occasionally it comes up that you want to be able to do something quickly instead of placing hundreds of blocks. Or you want to copy something you built. The MC Python code allows you to write a script that does this.

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

#47

Post by jakupovic »

colinmhayes wrote: post #41
jedberg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, I started programming on my own at 7 with no guidance. Mainly because my IBM PC booted into a BASIC window if you didn't put the DOS disk in. I asked my mom to get my some magazines from the library so I could copy the games in them. So it's not totally odd for a 7 year old (or I was odd, which is quite possible).

I started coding when I was 12, which itself was strange. I attended a top 10 engineering program and around half of the cs students came in with 0 programming experience. There's no rush. Let kids be kids, if they want to code great, just don't force it. And don't be upset when they burn out after 1.5 hours of extra work a day.

I started programming when I was 19, because that's when I got a computer (more projection) but in any case hard to not project onto your own kids. I think.

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

#48

Post by leesalminen »

chasd00 wrote: post #10

The most success i've had with my 8 year old is building games in Roblox and the LUA scripting that comes along with that. We also have written some MicroPython to drive a small rover. With kids, or my kids at least, you have to be able to show some tangible results quickly or else they get bored. ...kind of like dealing with your boss. another thing that my 8 year old is really into that surprised me is networks. Ex…

Networking was what really got me to do a deep dive into technology. Circa 2002, I really really wanted to LAN Party with my neighbor across the street remotely but neither of our 802.11b routers could reach. We spent so much time reading about how to do this and we ended up building a pair of Pringles can antennas on WiFi extenders, and long ethernet cables running through our yards into our bedroom windows, which ended up working great.

Fun memories. Networks are cool.

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

#49

Post by lmilcin »

ro_bit wrote: post #23

> We plan to do some more complicated robots and also make our own fun mods for Minecraft (as soon as I figure out how to hook up Scratch to recent version of it). You can't quite hook up Scratch itself to Minecraft (not that I know of, at least), but if you want to use Minecraft as a backbone for this kind of education, you might be interested in Pneumaticcraft, which includes little programmable drones that are pro…

There is a mod that allows running Scratch on Minecraft server but it was not ported beyond 1.8 or something. I plan to see how it works and maybe port it or do something like that for recent Minecraft version.

I like the idea of Pneumaticcraft. He already knows absolutely everything about Minecraft (can tell the version the map was generated in by looking at it). One Christmas wish was for Santa to help Mojang release 1.17 faster... So I am pretty confident he would like to be able to have some new game mechanics to play with.

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

#50

Post by jennyyang »

My son picked up Scratch programming over lockdown by taking an Outschool course, and then he joined John Hopkins CTY online courses and has been programming on his own since then purely for pleasure.

He has made videos and animations and I'm most shocked by his ability to debug his programs so well. I will give him tips every now and then, especially if he runs into problems, but I largely just let him do whatever he wants.

I never forced this on him, it's something he enjoys immensely. I myself didn't learn how to program until after graduating from college, so I know how little value learning programming at an early age is, except as a form of enjoyment.

He asked to learn Python but I refused, since I find it weird that he would be learning the same language that I myself am using to earn a living! But the upside is I can always outsource my work to him while I relax. Seriously though, I will teach him when he's ready but right now there's no use case for him to learn.

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