Ask HN: Please share your experience teaching your kids to program

One of my kids learned Scratch at home. He tried some local classes, hoping they would teach more advanced material, but they were introductory and he spent his time tutoring the other kids (not a bad lesson in itself!)

We briefly tried GameMaker Studio 2, however we had no prior experience and finding out what functions were needed or called made it a high friction experience.

He has been playing Minecraft since a young age, and creates elaborate redstone mechanisms. I like how this mixes creativity, spatial planning, and boolean logic, and doesn't require learning a new UI or language.

Most recently we tried creating a Minecraft mod in Java using Forge. I cannot state strongly enough: do not do this. The Forge architecture is fundamentally broken, whereby it adds some functionality but otherwise forces you to code directly against decompiled Java classes.

Most tutorials only work with a specific version of Forge/Minecraft. There are no release notes or documentation, because there is no API. (To be fair, the Forge aspect is documented, though I only found it useful once I already knew what it was trying to explain.)

So what started out as an exciting father-son project became something I dreaded.

When I have taught kids programming I feel I have been most successful by when I could give a glimpse into the high level workings.

Most of the time I don't have many hours so what I try is to inspire by creating something in a few lines and show what it is all about: input, output, calculations, loops and branching and how we can have fun with it.

I've used the tools at hand:

20 years ago I used VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and made a Caesar Cipher, ran it in a debugger.

When I taught teenagers in school I mostly used autohotkey.

Later I've used Go or Java, even with JSF(!) when that was what I was using at the time.

Mostly I try to get as fast as possible to the point were something works, then set a breakpoint and single step through it.

One favourite of mine is the good old guessing game that hasn't changed that much since BASIC on C64:

  > Write a number from 1 to 100:
  64
  > My number is lower, Try again.
  > Write a number from 1 to 100:
  37
  > My number is higher, Try again.
  > Write a number from 1 to 100:
  ...
  etc etc
  ...
  You gueesed it!

This introduces output, input, loops and if-statements, and you can let the kids have fun with the debugger, looking at the secret number in memory to guess it correctly at first try etc. It can also be done easily in most mainstream languages and frameworks that you have a working environment for, from VBA through WinForms through Java or Python console apps to serverside or frontend web applications.

Also FWIW: Kids around here (Norway) often have some programming at school it seems - even before grade 7. It is mostly scratch variants I think, but I'm also happy to see that at least some teachers have shown them how to open the console in the browser (Inspect Element) and have fun by "hacking" the html and css.

Well OP is an adult and not my child.

It's interesting I have had little success in garnering enthusiasm for coding with my kids. I have taken the route of giving them exposure to it and occasional incentives to go a bit further, but never pushing it much beyond that. I wonder if technology these days is just so advanced that they do not see the link between the basics that programming starts out with and the apps they use day to day. For me, at 10 I could write a program myself in basic that was within range of the actual games and professional applications that were being made at the time. That is just so far from possible these days.

Somewhat related: At one point I introduced my kids to what I called the number-machine-game. It goes like this:

I ask my kids to say a number, and then I do something to that number and tell them the answer.

Their job is to figure out the calculation I do.

Examples:

- I add a number: they say 3, I say 8. They say 11, I say 16

- I multiply a number.

- I multiply by something and add something else.

- etc

If you want to drive them nuts you can count the letters of the number, i.e. four = f o u r = 4, five = f i v e = also 4, ten = t e n = 3 etc :-D

(I might have gotten the idea from HN, but the above is how I taught it.)