Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh, did the kid understand that 3 != "3"? I'd be stumped how to explain that...
Sure give them a cookie and a picture of a cookie.
Brilliant
Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
101–109 of 109 posts
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#102Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#103Tss.... replace all Code with print(" !!!!!!YOU WON THIS GAME !!!!!!")" ;)
totally! i was so proud when she figured this out!
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#104My 4yo doesn't know how to read yet, introducing him to programming is definitively out of the scope for now. And yet. We have been doing videogames together. (Maybe spent 4 or 5 hours total, distributed in several months. I don't want to overwhelm him or anything). I found that pico-8 is an excellent platform for doing this kind of collaborative thing. I can do the programming (for now) and draw basic sprites (for n…
You don't need to read before programming Scratch Jr
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is naive but I have a lot of hope for Racket in this space. I'm just hoping it gets more institutional support for making educational tools with it. The line numbers definitely help you imagine the computer mechanically reading and executing the lines. I wasn't taught with BASIC so in the few times I've had to modify a program with meaningful line numbers I have often used make or similar to just put them…
Yes I share that hunch too and been trying it with the kids off and on. The team's work with Bootstrap ( https://www.bootstrapworld.org ) is actually pretty awesome .. where they're trying to accommodate even kids who may not have access to a computer. One of the best CS educational efforts I've come across. Check out racketcon2020 ( https://con.racket-lang.org/ ) where Kathi Fisler (co-founder of Bootstrapworld) is…
Well there you go, I think I have an idea and someone is 10 steps ahead of me! Glad to see it!
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look I don’t want to criticise but I’ve got to say, this is the sort of thing that makes kids hate programming. “Hey kids ready to do some super exciting math in a computer program?” Nah. I had a computer teacher who managed to make me bored and disinterested with stuff like this, despite me being crazy crazy crazy interested in computers. The best way to teach kids programming is via programmable graphics I.e visual…
All I can say is it went pretty well for me. Remember that this wasn't a full-on class; it was a "career day" where I had at most 5 minutes with any student, most of whom had no experience with any kind of programming whatsoever. And my main goal was actually to get "normal", not crazy-interested-in-computers children to experience the cognitive dissonance of running `./grade.pl 10000` and seeing it print out "A". My…
> "Oh, I see -- you tell it what to do and then it does it!"
I love it
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#107I remember taking some classes in basic when I was 7.
I teach my daughter programming in Scratch and it much easier. The fact that she can record sounds and draw her on characters are just some of the aspects that make Scratch appealing.
Addons like MakeyMakey make it more interactive.
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardly. Programming should be treated like reading: an essential life skill. And if you use reading as the example, you can start developing an interest in books before the child is actually old enough to read. The OP isn't taking his daughter through a coding course, just showing her that cool things are capable via coding. What could be wrong with that?
I'm curious why anyone would think programming is an essential life skill, considering how many successful people are alive today who cannot code. Another thought: when ML starts getting applied to solving programming (see recent GPT-3 demos for many examples), do you think by the time that 5 year old is 20, programming will still be a viable career for humans?
Hacker News readers include some of the most sheltered and naïve people in the world. It really beggars belief sometimes just how out of touch with reality they are. A lot of them are funnelled through university straight into ridiculously high paying jobs and will never experience life at a normal level.
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#109Captains log, stardate 345.455.33: I record this for people who might want to try this with kids around 10 years old: I made a game with my daughter, according to the .apk date it was 5 years ago so she was 10. I started by making a project in android studio. Then a gameloop, where you had one function for drawing and one function for handling clicks/screen presses. So when you pressed 'play' on studio, it opened an…
I made a game with my 9-year old who's struggling with math. Because of this I did all the programming, but I made him draw the main hero and all the monsters. He's got an interesting style. You can see the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1226170/Forest_of_MATH/ Of course, the game itself is meant for him (and other kids) to play and practice basic math. I hope he'll get to program his own games in a co…
The game looks great! I love the idea of the maze, it brings me back to the RPG games I played when I was younger.
What was the tech stack you used to make the game? I'm wondering if there are any tools or frameworks intuitive enough to make the game with a 9-10 year old.