Ask HN: Best resources for teaching my 8 year old to code

#1

Post by cdnsteve » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

Looking for feedback for resources and ideas on how to ease my son into coding. He loves Minecraft and has done hour of code. Now he's excited to build his own website. Any kid friendly options out there that cater to this?

I was thinking of setting up a Node server with hot reload so he can make changes and instantly see them while we go over some of the basics of HTML as a starting point, create a few pages and link them to each other. Having an immediate feedback loop will be important.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for teaching my 8 year old to code

#2

Post by sotojuan » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:21 PM UTC

Can't you skip the Node server and have him just use index.html and refresh? That way he won't rely on you to set it up. Alternatively, there are many services like Glitch that probably give you auto-reloading.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for teaching my 8 year old to code

#3

Post by saluki » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:22 PM UTC

Have him work through the book Head First HTML and CSS.

Develop locally save, refresh the browser to view (Checkout Laravel Valet for local web server on OSX).

After that walk through registering a domain and basic hosting, uploading via FTP. Just so he knows how it works.

After that move over to storing things in a repo and deploying.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for teaching my 8 year old to code

#4

Post by jstewartmobile » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

live.js and any webserver that answers HEAD requests would accomplish with fewer moving parts.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for teaching my 8 year old to code

#5

Post by ecesena » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

For web, try creating a react site. I'm not suggesting you teach him react, but the environment is set up for you already and auto refreshes every time you save.

Another good project, if you plan to go from html to coding, is https://microbit.org

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for teaching my 8 year old to code

#6

Post by lhorie » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:35 PM UTC

Sounds like you're trying to work backwards from your production setup into a "toy" one. Honestly, HMR is a double-edged sword. Your son is much more likely to understand the fundamental HTTP request lifecycle if he needs to manually refresh, than if his environment does magical web-socket-based code rebinding.

I'd suggest going the opposite way: start off with vanilla local HTML files. At the very start, he's going to have his hands full with HTML and CSS, then eventually JS and dev tools. It will make way more sense for him down the road if you introduce templating/routing after he realizes the tediousness of copying and pasting layout changes across multiple HTML files.

For introducing server-side things, I'd suggest something web-centric like PHP. It may not be sexy, but it does two important things: 1) it won't bog him down as much as Node with configuration/plumbing stuff like setting up a database or adding static asset middleware, and 2) it will expand your son's horizon from just-javascript-development to polyglot development.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for teaching my 8 year old to code

#7

Post by pshift » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

test

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for teaching my 8 year old to code

#8

Post by tmaly » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

I would start with something less abstract, more concrete to start. I have a 4 year old who picked up the ability to program this simple mouse to navigate the maze and find the cheese. If I try to go too abstract, you can see the eyes glazing over.

I was at a steam fair last weekend, and they had the OhBot, a programmable robot face, on display. It is programmed with what appeared to be a version of Scratch. You could control the head, mouth, and eyes with the track pad and keys. Kids were really into that and there was quite a line at that table.

Thinkfun also has a good board game to teach programming logic called Code Master Programming Logic Game.

If you really do want to go a more abstract route, I would start with the Python for Kids book by Jason Briggs. Once he gets through that, get the Python Crash Course next and work through the 3 problems in that book. It has one where you make a Django app with a user login.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for teaching my 8 year old to code

#9

Post by SnowingXIV » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 6:36 PM UTC

saluki wrote: post #3

Have him work through the book Head First HTML and CSS. Develop locally save, refresh the browser to view (Checkout Laravel Valet for local web server on OSX). After that walk through registering a domain and basic hosting, uploading via FTP. Just so he knows how it works. After that move over to storing things in a repo and deploying.

I agree with this simplistic approach, naturally I'm sure like many of us did when we were learning start to ask the questions "I'm doing this over and over again which seems really redundant, not secure, prone to human errors, etc, there must be a better a way!" and at that time you can happily explain to him that for the majority of the stack there is usually a solution that someone has come up with that solves those pain points.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for teaching my 8 year old to code

#10

Post by cityzen » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 6:54 PM UTC

I would say start with Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/)

I have tried to teach my kids "programming" but it isn't until they are invested for their own reasons that they really care to learn this stuff. We let my oldest just look around at projects on scratch so he could find things HE was interested in (minecraft, gravity falls, etc) and then he was interested enough to start copying and manipulating projects (we didn't even show him how to do it, he just figured it out). Now he has posted his own first project and had the unique feeling of "shipping" something. I think that "shipping" feeling is the quick feedback kids need to get and stay engaged.