11–18 of 18 posts
If he's interested, spending time with him doing some Alice or Kodu might have an effect over the long term.
But passions and interests build over time and at age 11 are heavily influenced by the interests of peers.
lego mindstorms
Get him one of these http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition - and nothing else, no PC, no games console, no smartphone. When I were a lad, we made our own fun. Out of rocks. And we liked it that way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a series where you dictate written programs and then debug them. http://learncodethehardway.org/ If the question were about sports, then yes, it would be similar. (eg: football) If your child is passionate about football, begs to watch games etc; consider enrolling him in a football league where he will play football and buy him a book that explains real plays that wont talk down to him because he is a child. If…
For an 11 year old, a more visual pseudo programming language (see Scratch or Alice) is more appropriate than jumping into something like PHP or C. Even Codea is a jump... but Lua is pretty friendly for someone seeing code for the first time. My kids aren't passionate about sports but they play soccer. The question that I could have asked is 'what's the best league in my area to be in?'. I wouldn't expect that reader…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For an 11 year old, a more visual pseudo programming language (see Scratch or Alice) is more appropriate than jumping into something like PHP or C. Even Codea is a jump... but Lua is pretty friendly for someone seeing code for the first time. My kids aren't passionate about sports but they play soccer. The question that I could have asked is 'what's the best league in my area to be in?'. I wouldn't expect that reader…
Disagree on Scratch or Alice being necessarily better. At 11, he can certainly jump into languages like PHP or Python perfectly fine. Many programmers (including many here) started a much younger age than 11 and at a time when Scratch or Alice may not have been available. There's nothing wrong with going straight to those.
Nothing wrong with going directly to programming languages if that's what the kid's into.
If your son is passionate about technology and computers, direct him to learning to code the hard way series. Or pick up a book that will teach programming by creating a series of simple games. If he his not, stop trying to live vicariously through him.
lego mindstorms
Surprised no one mentioned HacketyHack. Anyone have any experience with that?