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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?

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  1. Re:Minecraft Mods by mitcheli · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

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