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Ask Slashdot: How To Introduce a 7-Year-Old To Programming?
THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER writes I'm a professional programmer and have been programming since I was a small boy. I want to introduce this to my 7-year-son but know nothing about teaching this to children. Since he enjoys Roblox and Minecraft very much, and knows how to use computers already, I suspect teaching him to write his own small games would be a good starting point. I'm aware of lists like this one, but it's quite overwhelming. There are so many choices that I am overwhelmed where to start. Anyone in the Slashdot in the community have recent hands-on experience with such tools/systems that he/she would recommend?
Use scratch. It's mildly obnoxious for a real programmer, but has everything you need off hand, and program flow is very easy to visualize.
Use Scratch - https://scratch.mit.edu/ It's what CoderDojo uses when teaching kids programming. It has a fun, immediately responsive interface. Bright colours and cartoon characters to attract kids, is easy to make basic games which makes it more fun, and still teaches programming logic.
My kid loves this one: http://codecombat.com/
I got him started on it when he was 10, and he completed all of the free levels in two weeks with minimal help after I worked with him through the first few.
Lots of other great recommendations here: http://venturebeat.com/2014/06...
The board game one I've heard is good for younger kids, but once they have it down it's rather boring.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Minecraft Mods are an excellent way. My youngest latched onto those with no issues. Ironically, I tried to teach my 13 year old Apple's Swift language and he was totally uninterested, but mu youngest is latching right onto it, finding ways to modify our test game we're working on, and reciting back to me what objects, methods, and attributes are. I think he even understands inheritance and method overrides. He's got the tree structure of nodes in SKNodeKit down as well. And he's 9. And to think, the 13 year old was the one who expressed a desire to learn how to write games. To each his own...
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Children aren't clones of their parents. (And even when we discover a way to make clones, they still won't be this kind of clones.)
"I would have benefitted from learning programming early" or even "I did benefit from learning programming early" are terrible reasons to teach your kid programming early unless the benefits apply to most people, not just to you. And they don't.
This is just a variation of the "how do I get my kid interested in sci-fi" or "how do I get my daughter interested in programming" questions we've had before, and the answer is the same.
This is how my kids started with Minecraft plugins, a plugin called ScriptCraft: https://github.com/walterhiggi... .js files in a directory or directly on the command line in-game. JavaScript was very approachable and forgiving, and gave them immediate visual feedback on their code. Now my 10-year-old has written a Java mod while my younger one is interested in trying. I swear the desire to mod Minecraft is doing more for STEM than any Pearson curriculum...
It lets you write mods in JavaScript, either with separate
E pluribus unum