Beautiful story very inspiring thanks for sharing it with us.
Is it? I just get a blank page.
I just get gears turning forever and never loading anything.
Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
11–20 of 88 posts
Re: Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
#12I decided to teach my niece how to program at the age of 10 as well. She had already just naturally gotten the hang of the computer since she was about 6 (though I had to reverse the mouse buttons because originally her small hands couldn't left click). At 10 years old she was already telling my sister-in-law how to do things, was a near master of google-fu and had all the game sites she liked bookmarked. I wanted to show her what else was possible, without it seeming 'sciencey' (apparently that is the new equivalent of 'nerdy').
I knew her weakness was video games - so I got her using DS Game Maker (http://dsgamemaker.com/) which allows you to to create games for your Nintendo DS. I had already set her up with a flash cart, so getting the games on there was a breeze. She started off with some real simple things, but as she learned how to do more and more (with some help from me on getting jump 'physics' going in Dynamic BASIC) and she eventually had a little game with her dog as the star in a 30 room game that each had puzzles to solve.
It's amazing what someone so young can accomplish - sadly her interest has dwindled and she is now on track to become a fashion designer. We shall see ;)
Re: Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
#13I am continually amazed at the capabilities of kids. Their ability to understand whats presented to them is astounding. I really think one of the problems with the education system is we have this idea that everyone must progress in all areas at the same rate, and we stop teaching kids new things until they understand the set of things they "should" know for their age. In a structured school system she wouldn't be al…
Or maybe we're expecting too much of the school system when it should be the responsibility of parents to teach their skills valuable skills. School isn't the solution to all our problems.
Agreed. By definition, school has to cater to the average. It's meant to provide a baseline for society. There are no rules that education must be contained within the school grounds. The way I see it, they handle the boring stuff like geography so I can spend time on teaching fun stuff like computing!
Re: Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
#14I decided to teach my niece how to program at the age of 10 as well. She had already just naturally gotten the hang of the computer since she was about 6 (though I had to reverse the mouse buttons because originally her small hands couldn't left click). At 10 years old she was already telling my sister-in-law how to do things, was a near master of google-fu and had all the game sites she liked bookmarked. I wanted to…
As a programmer with absolutely no interest in fashion, I found "Project Runway" to be the closest thing to watching a programming reality show. They talk about design and construction, and how they interrelate. If you can get past the obvious shortcomings, there was some interesting problem solving being done by the most talented contestants.
Ditto for cooking shows, but it's easier to judge the results of fashion because I can't taste the cooking show results.
Re: Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
#15I respect the efforts the author put in to teach kids how to program. That being said, I really don't think HTML/Javascript is the right choice for kids. The web stack is even considered messy from professional web programers' perspective. My son will turn seven soon. I did some research on programming languages/kits for kids around that age. I finally settled down on Robomind, which is more or less of a modern varia…
The web stack is only messy once you get beyond the basics and want to make it cross browser. As a teaching tool it doesn't need to have a modern design, look the same to everyone and work in IE6. I had similar thoughts to jbattle. Giving kids the ability to do something, put it online, and make it instantly accesible to their friends and the world is huge. It also helps open their mind to how accesible their creatio…
You and jbattle do have a point that web stack is more accessible and easier to share the results. After playing with Robomind (a Java GUI app) last night, I did wish it were a web app.
Re: Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
#16Has there ever been a serious study which tries to determine at what age children are able to grasp programming constructs? (loops, functions, etc) We were all once little children and I know my own personal timeline, but I can't say I've ever seen a large collection of data points analyzed.
Not that I know of, but I would say that teaching "loops" and "functions" is almost definitely going to bog them down. Loops are not interesting on their own, but rather in terms of what you can do with them. So teaching them how to count (which is easy for children to grasp) is the proper beginning, followed by repetition (do something n times). They will learn loops, but only in terms of fulfilling a purpose. Things like functions come in later, as they are initially unnecessary. When they start to write the same lines of code over and over, you can point out the idea of reusing parts of code that get stuck in something called a function. Abstraction is thus quite easy to get them to understand (I speak only from experience, not a studied truth).
Basically, you teach them what they need in order to accomplish a specific task. Are arrays really useful to teach at first if they don't need serialized access to data? Better to wait until they need something like that. The goal is to give them problems that require those concepts and see if they ask for it. Initially, they might make 20 variables (where an array would do), and complain that it gets tiresome. Perfect opportunity to explain an array, while the interest is at a peak.
Re: Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
#17I respect the efforts the author put in to teach kids how to program. That being said, I really don't think HTML/Javascript is the right choice for kids. The web stack is even considered messy from professional web programers' perspective. My son will turn seven soon. I did some research on programming languages/kits for kids around that age. I finally settled down on Robomind, which is more or less of a modern varia…
I've always thought that you'd have to worry about "technical elitists" dismissing HTML/JavaScript as "not programming", since that's what I experienced when I was growing up.
On the other hand, Khan Academy CS chose JavaScript because it made it easy to share the results with others. So... nowadays I wonder.
Re: Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
#18I decided to teach my niece how to program at the age of 10 as well. She had already just naturally gotten the hang of the computer since she was about 6 (though I had to reverse the mouse buttons because originally her small hands couldn't left click). At 10 years old she was already telling my sister-in-law how to do things, was a near master of google-fu and had all the game sites she liked bookmarked. I wanted to…
As a programmer with absolutely no interest in fashion, I found "Project Runway" to be the closest thing to watching a programming reality show. They talk about design and construction, and how they interrelate. If you can get past the obvious shortcomings, there was some interesting problem solving being done by the most talented contestants. Ditto for cooking shows, but it's easier to judge the results of fashion b…
Well - it's pretty interesting that you mention the technical aspects of fashion design. A friend of mines wife works as a technical designer for one of the big fashion companies - her job is to take the designs made by designers, and redesign them for mass-market so that they can be machine made.
I made it a point to tell my niece (just this last weekend) that she should pay attention in school because with that knowledge she can do anything and become anything she wants. If she wants to do fashion design, she will still need to know math because it is important (giving her an example of how me and my 6 year old nephew obviously don't wear the same size shirts - so how would they figure that out?). I just want her to do good in life no matter what route she takes :)
Re: Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
#19There's a great open source initiative to teach kids programming called Kids Ruby: http://www.kidsruby.org
Anyone can host a class anywhere or just use the kidsruby program.
Re: Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
#20That's a wonderful story. It's a real tragedy that most children don't have role models like this.