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Teaching My Daughter To Code

blogs.kent.ac.uk

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Re: Teaching My Daughter To Code

#11

Post by mattmcknight »

I installed scratch for my daughter, when she was 5. She did a lot of simple things that were like Flash animations. Now that she is 7, she is creating some more complex games, and tons of ideas for games. We've been messing around with Google App Inventor for Android as well, which uses the same framework. She does a lot of MS Office work in school, including Excel formulas, but they don't seem to tackle actual coding early enough.

Our next projects will probably involve doing some web development and then perhaps Mindstorms.

My first experience in programming was reverse engineering the programs that ran on the TRS-80 we had at school to change the names of the characters in the exercises to be other kids and teachers and allow me to get the high scores on the games. It's a little harder to imagine people starting that way with the complexity of a lot of the software that we interact with, but I tried to give her a flavor for that by modifying some of the image files that came with the games she has installed.

Re: Teaching My Daughter To Code

#13

Post by [deleted] »

mattmcknight wrote: post #11

I installed scratch for my daughter, when she was 5. She did a lot of simple things that were like Flash animations. Now that she is 7, she is creating some more complex games, and tons of ideas for games. We've been messing around with Google App Inventor for Android as well, which uses the same framework. She does a lot of MS Office work in school, including Excel formulas, but they don't seem to tackle actual codi…

[deleted]

Re: Teaching My Daughter To Code

#16

Post by jlees »

ig1 wrote: post #10
Cushman wrote: post #6

I was learning C when I was six years old. Definitely helped that my older brother (then 11) was the one teaching me— I wonder if having young children learn from older children might be good advice in general?

I first coded when I was about the same age, but at that point it was mostly type out programs from magazines and making minor tweaks (this was in Atari Basic). When I was 9-10 I was writing my own simple games in Amiga Basic and later CanDo. When I was 13 I started learning K&R C and then later Quest-C (A VB like tool for C). I remember there was one other kid in my year at school who was better at C than me at the…

I was typing out BASIC programs when I was around 6, got to love growing up with the Spectrum/C64 and the wonderful BBC Micro. I think it worked well; I still remember it being so magical (a since overused word sadly), and a lot of my early tweaking was PEEKing and POKEing around in games to cheat.

The OP has it right -- if you're doing something you want (building a Dr Who game, changing your high score, turning all the baddies into strawberries, making a spider run around the screen to scare your mum) that's the best, dare I say only, way to learn.

Having said this, nobody at my school could program at all (despite the BBC's best efforts). I didn't learn "real" programming until university; web scripting and PHP before that. Maybe that's why I'm such a hacky coder even now.

Re: Teaching My Daughter To Code

#17

Post by jlees »

nhangen wrote: post #15

This is cool. My son is 8 and I'm trying to get him interested in learning code, but right now he can't draw the line between code and the games he plays.

Find a game where you can easily edit a save file, map file or high score table and let him poke about in it...

Re: Teaching My Daughter To Code

#18

Post by kadavy »

mattmcknight wrote: post #11

I installed scratch for my daughter, when she was 5. She did a lot of simple things that were like Flash animations. Now that she is 7, she is creating some more complex games, and tons of ideas for games. We've been messing around with Google App Inventor for Android as well, which uses the same framework. She does a lot of MS Office work in school, including Excel formulas, but they don't seem to tackle actual codi…

I think it's a good strategy to start with something like Flash. Personally, as I was learning to complement my design skills with programming skills, Flash was a great entry point because it was fun.

It's much more motivating if, by writing a couple of lines of code, you can make a ball bounce - than, say, publishing text or solving math problems.

(at the not-so-tender age of 23)

Re: Teaching My Daughter To Code

#19

Post by homonculus »

obsessive1 wrote: post #4

My first (real) programming experience was with PHP when I was 14. Before that, I fiddled around with a bit of flash and ActionScript. I found it so much easier to learn by actually having a project and working out how to make it a reality as opposed to just reading about it in a book.

I'm 15 and using PHP. It is very satisfying to use, especially after the depression and boredom of school.

I wish I had started younger, the way some of these other kids did.

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