81–88 of 88 posts
My brother asked me when and how I though I could teach my baby niece so that she could make "a lot of money as a developper". My answer was "when she asks for it". There are many things a kid should learn, and among them, a huge number are more important than programming (plus sometimes a pre-requisite for it): - reading - writing - basic maths - critical analysis - building your own idea - defending yourself verbal…
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my nephews asked for it. it was Minecraft that got them into it. unfortunately that also meant that they wanted to learn Java, so they will probably be put off for life.
I always believed that minecraft had a plugin system allowing the use of many programming language. Did MS remove that when buying it?
The educational versions of minecraft (e.g. the raspi version) integrate python scripting directly.
Microsoft forked a "bedrock" version of minecraft that I'm not as familiar with and that has a different plugin ecosystem. The Java-based version still has all the same plugin capabilities it always has.
Of course, being a biologist is much more than playing with a microscope, but it's just a way to get kids excited about science and inspire them to be curious and inquisitive.
Coding is just like this microscope. It enables children to discover the world of computer science and software.
My father was a programmer in 70' to mid 90'. He would had loved for me getting into the topic as well and showed me various things like early VESA programming and simple games in the 80' (in Germany GDR on a self made computer wired to a color TV). But programming and how it works didn't caught my interest at all - zero. I was completely hooked by the graphics and games though.
In the early 90' after the fall of Berlin wall, a friend of my dad gave me 3D Studio for DOS on 14 floppy discs, and oh' boy this changed my life.
Started a career in the 3D film industry and it was 20 years after my childhood that I caught interest in programming. I was blown away by what the programmers could do with the 3D software Maya and slowly was dragged into it and the curiosity never ended.
Nowadays I'm mostly a programmer who's also interested in graphics. Have worked on various commercial products with embedded firmware, C++ GUIs and Web/JS projects.
I'm a programmer not because my dad showed me that stuff in my childhood, I got here out of an coincidence of getting 3D Studio for DOS.
Anyway, my dad is glad how it turned out in the end :)
Want to share my first hand experience as a kid of a programmer. My father was a programmer in 70' to mid 90'. He would had loved for me getting into the topic as well and showed me various things like early VESA programming and simple games in the 80' (in Germany GDR on a self made computer wired to a color TV). But programming and how it works didn't caught my interest at all - zero. I was completely hooked by the…
Now I'm approaching 40 and a full time web developer.
I gotta say, I had this same thought twenty years ago when my kiddos were pre-teens. Be creative! Make beautiful things! Don't haul up the data on the Xerox line like your old man! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsDkmVo2fg4 Man, was I WRONG! What a MISTAKE. My spouse and I fouled up some lives by teaching that attitude. My youngest wanted to do game dev. So she got Masters of Fine Art from an A school concentrating…
Even thinking about the aspirational reason, game artists don't make the money you might be thinking. That's engineering and engineering only.
It's like a tower of mistakes.
My son is almost 6 and I can say with near certainty that he will learn to code regardless of what I have to say about it. He is absolutely mesmerized by computers and as soon as he discovers that he can tell them exactly what to do he will most likely teach himself. It’s exactly what I did—my father worked at IBM and we always had a fairly capable PC at home but he was a mechanical engineer so I was on my own for le…
"I really hope we don’t add coding to the laundry list of rote skills that kids are evaluated on in school." Why?
> Sure, make it available for those who are interested, but let’s be honest—most kids will have little interest in coding, and forcing them to learn it anyways will not provide any lasting benefit.
This could apply to mathematically skills also. Personally, I would never raise any kids under this ideology. It seems to foster ignorance and conformism.
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I see a trend thats pushing away older experienced programmers just to replace them with young ones.
I’m 45. I haven’t seen it. I’m getting just as many offers and doors open now as I have since 1996. I’m very focused on keeping a network warm and keeping my resume buzzword compliant.