Ask HN: My 8-year old nephew finally wants to be a hacker. How should he start? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: My 8-year old nephew finally wants to be a hacker. How should he start?

#21

Post by runesoerensen » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 8:33 AM UTC

arisAlexis wrote: post #17

I think pushing him to be a hacker will turn him away from it as everything your parents/relatives tell you to do.

Not sure that's entirely true, but if anyone is being pushed here it'd be me - he really wants me to help him get started ;) Also see my comment below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8067851

Re: Ask HN: My 8-year old nephew finally wants to be a hacker. How should he start?

#22

Post by runesoerensen » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 9:02 AM UTC

thejteam wrote: post #11

I haven't delved into it, but I hear you can learn quite a bit of programming from Minecraft. And even if nothing else comes of it he gets to play a game his peers are playing and can talk to them about it.

This seems to be true - he's already playing it a lot and has referenced it several times when we've talked about how to build stuff (outside of Minecraft).

Re: Ask HN: My 8-year old nephew finally wants to be a hacker. How should he start?

#23

Post by logn » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 7:39 PM UTC

I started around age 10 on HTML and then programming after that.

I think starting with HTML is ideal as it's very simple, the web browsers are forgiving of syntax errors, and you can visually see results right away.

You can then naturally transition into learning programming to generate HTML.

And I think it's important for most of this to be self-guided with the help of books and such. The results will be much slower, but I think it will be more fun and educational.