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

My son recently turned 7yo and I have successfully got him interested in programming. We started about half a year ago playing Minecraft and building more and more complicated automated machines. Recently I have added some robots that can be programmed in Scratch and now we have also started writing some simple games in Scratch.

I am not just trying to teach him programming but also show that with a bit of organization and working little bit each day you can achieve pretty huge results. So we created a very simple version of a game. I have then created a document where we are maintaining a listing of functionality we want to add. We then take them one by one, discuss how it can be added to the game and then tick off once it is done.

For Christmas he asked for some programming books ("how to make complicated Minecraft machines, how to write complicated commands and how to make mods").

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).

I am trying to not spend too much time on any given day (about 1,5h every day currently) so that ends up still wanting to do more.

I am also doing large part of coding myself and we switch who sits by the editor when he says he knows how to do something. I am trying to keep him enthusiastic by showing constant progress which I think is more important than that he actually does everything by himself.

I have 20 years of development experience so generally programming is not an issue for me.

Please, share your experiences, things that you have tested with your kids that did or did not work. Any tips you have personally tested.

At first my dad put me a bit on CodeAcademy [0] which taught me tons of basics but didn't really get me hooked.

What really got me into coding was by thinking of a way I could use it to build something related to my interests or that would be useful for me.

That seems to be what you're doing with the games by linking it to something he's interested in so that's nice.

It can really be anything though, and you should try to show him the enormous area of things he can do with coding.

In my case I wanted to do my english homework faster, so I tried building a very simplistic program that could find literary devices (metaphors, similes, alliteration) etc... in the literature texts I had to study.

Also you should make sure you don't force it and that the passion and interest comes from him, which seems to be the case with the way he asked for books about coding.

[0]: https://www.codecademy.com/

So I was pretty worried when he came asking to get him signed up for a robotics class (3h every Saturday for couple of months).

I already have some ideas how I want to introduce him to robotics but I am not going to intervene here. Just made sure he knows he can always come back and tell me he is no longer interested in the classes and we will just cut it.

As to creative work, I figured out already it is better if I do most of figuring out how to solve some problems (and let him solve just enough to not get bored with it) and he is spending time figuring out what kind of features we want in the games, for example.

We then discuss what is and what is not feasible and how things can be working and I still try to make sure he understands how the program works.

I know he understands at least some of it because he can take educated guesses at how to modify the program to change it to do what he wants.

This seems to be really fun for him so I plan for it to stay that way for some time.