Hi all. My son is eleven years old and I'm looking into a good way to get him passionate about computer science and programming. There are a lot of resources out there. Does anyone have a recommendation on the best?
Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
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Re: Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
#2Get 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.
Re: Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
#3If 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.
Re: Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
#4Here are some ideas (and we've used pretty much all of them)
Alice, from Randy Pausch (http://www.thelastlecture.com/) team http://alice.org/
Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/
Codea--programming on the iPad. I highly recommend getting a keyboard. http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/
Art of Problem Solving has online programming classes http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/School/courseinfo.php?cou...
Good luck!
Re: Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
#5If 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.
You'd recommend to an 11 year old to read a book "learning to code the hard way"? Really?
I think you're making a lot of assumptions with a comment like "stop trying to live vicariously through him". Would you have had the same reaction if the question was about sports?
Re: Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
#6lego mindstorms
Re: Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
#7If 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.
You'd recommend to an 11 year old to read a book "learning to code the hard way"? Really? I think you're making a lot of assumptions with a comment like "stop trying to live vicariously through him". Would you have had the same reaction if the question was about sports?
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 you love football and want to see your child play football, but he has expressed no interest in it, it may not be A Really Good Idea(tm).
(EDIT: added link)
Re: Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
#8Find a nice open source game and start showing him how to modify/extend it.
Re: Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd recommend to an 11 year old to read a book "learning to code the hard way"? Really? I think you're making a lot of assumptions with a comment like "stop trying to live vicariously through him". Would you have had the same reaction if the question was about sports?
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 readers would jump to the conclusion that we were living vicariously through them.
At any rate, I thought it was a reasonable initial question. We don't push kids into programming, but we do make materials available when they show interest. That's why I'm familiar with what I posted. However a comment such as "stop trying to live vicariously through him" comes across as rather snide.
Re: Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd recommend to an 11 year old to read a book "learning to code the hard way"? Really? I think you're making a lot of assumptions with a comment like "stop trying to live vicariously through him". Would you have had the same reaction if the question was about sports?
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…
Oh and I'm not totally humorless.