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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

#91

Post by dscokween »

There are some great resources with arduino devices and arduino.cc - though it might be a little tricky for 7. I suppose it depends on the kid. Getting some light kits from adafruit and some prebuilt scripts can help, though. Wearable LED tags are a pretty clout-earning trinket for the 7-year-old set.

Thonny http://thonny.org is fun browser based tool for learning things as simple as turtle graphics (anyone else start with LOGO?) or even up to more fully developed programs.

My kid and some of her friends did some video game design using the "Bloxels" game, but the (free) app makes the actual box of color pixels mostly irrelevant. I think this is a great way to think of tile based gaming structure and layout in a GUI format without the burden of command line. It's the same sort of appeal as Minecraft target audiences.

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

#93

Post by ARandomerDude »

dave_sid wrote: post #79
sharker8 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually making accounting fun for kids is also a good idea and should be encouraged.

Well you could say that about any vocation.

Maybe. But accounting, or at least grasping personal finance, is a practical gift in a way that many others aren't at an introductory level. For example if you only want to be a manager at McDonald's you have to learn the most basic of accounting tasks.

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

#94

Post by ransom1538 »

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.

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

#95

Post by dragonwriter »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #93
dave_sid wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you could say that about any vocation.

Maybe. But accounting, or at least grasping personal finance, is a practical gift in a way that many others aren't at an introductory level. For example if you only want to be a manager at McDonald's you have to learn the most basic of accounting tasks.

“Accounting” and “personal finance” and “spreadsheets” are three very different things that seem to have been used as if they were interchangeable in the subthread beginning with dave_sid’s hypothetical about an accountant asking about making spreadsheets more fun for kids.

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

#97

Post by murgindrag »

Path for an eight year old (who started at 5):

1) Hour of Code and Blockly, as well as some Blockly Games, age 5-7

2) Khan Academy JavaScript and processing.js at age 7.

He's pretty awesome at JavaScript now. The programming courses on Khan Academy are great. I will mention your child needs to be ready for it. At that age, a few months one way or the other is huge, as is having the mechanics of typing and mousing.

Next step from there is the book "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Developer Best Practices) " and Nandgame, as well as Micro:bit.

I recommend against Scratch. It's a rabbithole that goes in the wrong direction. You get stuck in a local minimum, where it's really hard to move onto real programming, and within Scratch, there are a lot of local minima (move to random position).

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

#98

Post by PebblesRox »

My kids aren't quite old enough, but I recently enjoyed the following stories:

"Haaarg, world!" (writing a vampire-themed number-guessing game with a six-year-old): http://davidbau.com/archives/2005/07/29/haaarg_world.html

Madlibs with a 13-Year-Old: https://nedbatchelder.com/text/madlibs.html

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

#99

Post by dragonwriter »

gfaure wrote: post #74
dave_sid wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. I don’t understand the recent trend to believe that we need to get kids into software engineering as soon as they pop out of the birth canal. My friend is an accountant. If he asked me for advice on how to make spreadsheets more fun for his kid I’d think he had something against his kid. In the words of Pink Floyd “Hey! Nerds! Leave them kids alone!”

To be fair, software engineering connects better to the interests of STEM-ish kids (video games, robotics, electronics) than spreadsheets ever could.

Having been a STEMish kid that only got into spreadsheets later than programming because my families first computers all came with BASIC but it wasn't until the third that I also had Visicalc, I'm not sure that spreadsheets really have that much less appeal than programming, presented in the right context. Even moreso with modern spreadsheets, where the barrier between spreadsheets and accessible programming tools is low, so using programming with spreadsheets is doable.

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

#100

Post by reubens »

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…

"You have to do give them just enough info to get started and hope it catches."

That's an important mantra, I think. If you cast the net wide enough, you'll find something they like, and want to follow... but it might not be programming.

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