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Ask HN: Teaching programming to a 10 year old, and I'm kind of lost

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Re: Ask HN: Teaching programming to a 10 year old, and I'm kind of lost

#42

Post by timthorn »

Take a look at mbed (http://mbed.org). It is designed for very rapid development (12/13 year olds were the test subjects, I think) and so abstracts a lot of the very hard stuff - but shows the basic concepts of microcontrollers. It has the benefit of allowing physical things to be controlled, like flashing lights.

Whatever happened to the expansion ports on home micros that provided full access to the microprocessor's bus? The BeBox's geek port was such a good idea...

Re: Ask HN: Teaching programming to a 10 year old, and I'm kind of lost

#45

Post by cies »

http://edu.kde.org/kturtle

i created kturtle for this purpose. on most linux distros it is available as kturtle, kdeedu-kturtle or kdeedu.

kde also runs on windows: http://windows.kde.org

i learnt programming by MSX-LOGO in dutch (my mother tongue). when i got into free software i decided to create an open source LOGO-like application to enable these days kids to have a smooth start as well.

personally i dont like point-and-click programming, as i belive programming is coding and therefor needs a keyboard.

good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Teaching programming to a 10 year old, and I'm kind of lost

#46

Post by citizen428 »

I put together a website collecting links to various programming languages/environments specifically targeting children (if anybody wants to make a prettier stylesheet for it, let me know):

http://www.happynerds.net/

Generally I'd advise starting with something interactive and fun, like eToys or Mindstorms. After that a project like Hackety Hack, Löve or Processing might be a good bridge into more "serious" programming. Some people also seem to like the HTML and JavaScript approach, because the development environment (a browser) is available virtually everywhere and it has a very short feedback cycle. I'm not too convinced of that, but YMMV.

Once your kid has the basics down, possibilities are almost endless. There's a plethora of freely available books (legally), of which I compiled a small subset here:

http://citizen428.net/archives/434

I'm also involved in teaching Ruby courses on RubyLearning.org, and while definitely not targeted at 10 year olds, our core Ruby course should be doable for a motivated teenager willing to learn.

Whatever you do, I think the most important thing is to focus on the fun. If kids enjoy what they do, they can learn super fast and will happily come back for more :-)

Re: Ask HN: Teaching programming to a 10 year old, and I'm kind of lost

#48

Post by duskwuff »

drdaeman wrote: post #37
duskwuff wrote: post #18

I'd avoid Dive Into Python and HTML5 -- both are intended as quick-start guides for those specific technologies, not as general programming tutorials. They won't make a lick of sense without significant prior programming experience.

About Dive Into Python: http://oppugn.us/posts/1272050135.html

I wouldn't go quite that far, but it certainly isn't for beginners.

Re: Ask HN: Teaching programming to a 10 year old, and I'm kind of lost

#49

Post by lkozma »

Probably not a popular opinion, but I found BASIC a nice way to learn about programming when I was around 10. Especially line numbering and goto's seemed intuitive and although I wrote lots of spaghetti-code, I'm glad I learned using a model that somewhat resembled how machines actually execute code.

Re: Ask HN: Teaching programming to a 10 year old, and I'm kind of lost

#50

Post by Elepsis »

Microsoft makes a kind of neat kid-oriented environment called Small Basic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/ff384126.aspx

Worth a shot. If you check out the blog, there are a number of tutorials available as well that can help kids get started.

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