Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to teach my young children to program?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–16 of 16 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to teach my young children to program?

#13

Post by HardyLeung »

mryan wrote: post #10

My nephew and I have had some success with "Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners". Many parts of the book direct the student to try out the examples in the interpreter, which I think is a nice way of demonstrating the concepts immediately. It starts with strings and other basics, and gets gradually more complex. By the end of the book you will have "written" a basic skiing game with pygame.…

I don't like that book. I tried it with my kid (almost 8). The first 3 chapters are okay, but then chapter 4 goes into the discussion about floating points, integer vs. doubles, integer-to-double conversion, arithmetic precision etc.

I'd say what the heck? I want to introduce the concept of variables, control flow, for/while loops, etc. I didn't expect that he has to jump through those unnecessary concepts to get to the basic.

Granted, the book was written with good intention (father "co-wrote" the book with the kid while trying to teach him programming), but I thought the book turned into something else that IMHO is not very good. Perhaps this book is geared towards older kids, but I think kids (and certainly adults) that are any older than 8 would have been bored to death by its very slow pacing.

I may try Learning Python the hard way... still looking at it.

Re: Ask HN: How to teach my young children to program?

#14

Post by jkeesh »

We are working on a site to teach CS to complete beginners (geared towards high school students), with a focus on providing good personal feedback. We using some javascript teaching libraries that make it really easy to get started writing games and animations. We just applied to YC with the idea--got an interview, but not accepted.

Your kids may be a bit young for this, but if you interested the site is codehs.com, and you can email me at jkeeshin@cs.stanford.edu.

Quick on my background: I'm a senior in cs at Stanford, and have been teaching the intro cs classes for three years, and running the main intro class (cs106a) for this entire year.

Post reply on HN