Ways to teach kids to code (2016)

I love these suggestions, especially the card game and making their own website.

I had my first real dev job when my son was born and I gave how to teach him code / reading / math a lot of thought. I tried speak and spells, workbooks, little toy pretend computers that had math games etc.

In the end just giving him a raspberry pi with ubuntu, a big kids keyboard and no mouse seems to have been all he ever needs / wants. It boots directly into the Unix shell, I aliased a little speak and spell script I tossed together and some shortcuts to music on youtube. And he doesn't even really need those.

He learned the basics much faster than I expected. Opening python for math, prepending "say" to words to have them read out loud (took some tooling in ubuntu...), control + C, control + W etc all seem to make general sense. And the slowness of the pi seems to help.

Anyway he started reading before turning three and seems to be doing well enough with math and basic variable assignment for whatever that's worth. Helping him make a website and getting him using git seems like a fun next step.

Now if only I could get him to care about anything more than his hotwheels collection...

I don't see it mentioned and I am bit surprised, but teaching kids how to breakdown "common" tasks into instructions. No programming language needed. Then, introducing edge cases.

I remember a programmer making a video about their child writing instructions to "make p&j" sandwich. Did you check if you have PB? What happens if you don't? Did you put the bread down first? Or are you applying PB to the counter.

I'd like to add Robozzle as a suggestion, a robot (turtle like) programming puzzle game, available on both Android and iOS. While simple in operation, the puzzles quickly become very challenging. Stepping through the program execution, with the ability to set breakpoints on the playing grid, feels a little bit like debugging.

As someone who does this regularly as a code club volunteer I'm not sure I see much useful advice there. Honestly the biggest challenge is accepting that within a group of kids the same age there'll be enormous variation in ability and motivation to pick up learning how to code. And what I have no real insight into is whether it even makes any difference in the long run (i.e. how many of the kids that do the whole course go on to make programming a significant part of their lives, or even if they don't, have it genuinely help them in some way). Still, I know I only got where I am today because my Dad sat down with me at age 9 or 10 and introduced me to programming - something obviously not all parents can do - so hopefully at least a few of these kids will get the same benefit.

They forgot Scratch!

https://scratch.mit.edu