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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?
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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Don't?
Why the heck are you supposing a 7 year old one should/could/want do that?
Can he write already? Read? (Likely yes) ... how is he in math? And why the funk do you want him to exercise his hobby behind a computer instead of playing outdoors with other kids, a dog or hanging in a rocking chair and reading, if he can read ...
Coding is a nice word to camouflage all the variations of developing, programming, software engineering, computer science ... what actually do you mean with coding?
Why don't you let him practice cooking and read a cook book and then let him experiment with cooking and write his own cooking book? That is far more "coding" than most "coders" ever do in their job.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I guess in some ways I got into programming because computers were a novelty and there wasn't an endless supply of free stuff, so in many ways programming was the entertainment. But now there is gobs of relatively high quality and free stuff to entertain that also /sort of/ scratches the builder itch (as I write this, my son is sitting nearby on the free-to-play Robocraft).
So the "problem" is that there is an endless stream of stuff competing for my kids' attention that (a) is of a quality leagues beyond anything they can hope to do anytime soon and (b) gives /some/ of the same "fix" I get from programming. Back in the olden days the gap between what you could do with e.g. BASIC and what you saw in commercial apps looked a lot smaller.
I'm always searching for something that does a good job of being an intermediate level - I can get my kids to do a lot of the intro / visual programming stuff and they like it, but then they run into this seemingly huge chasm when they try to go beyond that. It's like, "ok, so now you made a rudimentary game that runs inside this special environment on some website. You want to advance to something more flexible? Ok, um, now we need to talk about files and directories and a whole slew of tools and junk you never knew existed or were needed. Also, prepare to start typing a lot and using all those punctuation characters you rarely use in school assignments. And don't get me started if you want to get your little game onto a device so you can show your friends!"
On the one hand I think it's just part of getting into "real" programming and they just have to suck it up and deal with it. But I really think one or two of my kids could really get into programming and really like it, but I've yet to help them get over that hump from super basic stuff.
I have researched this subject extensively over the last several years. Most importantly, I have exposure to children between ages 6 and 14 that can program successfully with a text editor or IDE. The short answer is go straight to Python. You can read about my personal experience with my own children here: http://pychildren.blogspot.com... The main child is now 10 and using Python with IDLE and PyCharm. Also suggest you research this site: http://www.learningtech.org/wo... which I also have experience with by sending my own kid to the class. Note the Minecraft plugins from grade 4. Definitely wish I had started my eldest kid earlier as I think that age 8 would have been fine. There's a kid in my daughter's class that is 6 years old and completely killing it with PyGame. I think that I'm going to drop down from PyGame to Python Turtle (logo) with my daughter for a while. Good luck. Feel free to send me a note with your progress. I love hearing from parents with children under age 14 that are using text editors or IDEs.