41–50 of 138 posts
Game modding The first contact I had to actual programming was messing with Pawno scripts to make gameservers in San Andreas multiplayer when I was 12... Spent hours and hours programming with it. It started simple placing coordinates where the cars should spawn until I started to mess with more 'complicated' stuff like gates that open when player get near. I would get some game that is popular among kids that age (m…
I'm a huge fan of exercises instead of frontal introduction. I've had success with the Khan Academy program ("introduction to programming") and then giving them simple web exercises.
Are the kids remotely interested in programming, and does it make sense to try teaching them if they show no interest? As a child, I remember pushed towards taking piano lessons and hating every second of it.
Depends whether you want to teach code or computer science (and code). I wrote a book to teach 7-11 year olds to code in Python and Scratch and teach them some computer science along the way - I read a few other books out there first, and there's a lot of "just copy out this code and things will happen", which is exactly what I tried to avoid in this book. The reviews: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28232614-codi…
I was impressed with how quickly he went from "just tried this at school" to "leave me alone, Dad, I know what I'm doing here".
Seems like a good intro for kids.
I teach. I have the kids learn Python between age 9 and 11 depending on when they are interested. We write games and learn the fundamentals of CS by following the curriculum of Rice's "Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python" class designed by Rixner and Warren. It has a Python interpreter and game library that compiles in-browser into javascript, which is a very helpful design for a first class, and for sh…
Why Python rather than JavaScript?
Game modding The first contact I had to actual programming was messing with Pawno scripts to make gameservers in San Andreas multiplayer when I was 12... Spent hours and hours programming with it. It started simple placing coordinates where the cars should spawn until I started to mess with more 'complicated' stuff like gates that open when player get near. I would get some game that is popular among kids that age (m…
Codakid (based in Scottsdale, Arizona) teaches kids how to code with Minecraft mods amongst other things.