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Ask HN: How do you teach/introduce programming to your kids

1 points by harikb ↗ HN
This is probably too broad a question, but here are the things I have looked into and my initial reaction.

1. Scratch: Kids have gone through that - I am looking for something where code is written in a text editor.

2. Pico-8: This is Lua. I wish the editor was not pixelated and I am not sure if the 32K limit is a problem.

3. Python: Python for kids books, pygames: After the initial tiny programs, the next step seems too complicated for me to explain. pygames is a bit behind (was difficult to get it working).

4. Flutter: They start with class, async/await. Code (since it builds a UI) is too nested / hard to read.

What has worked for me somewhat

1. codecombat.com: At least they like this / stick with it (but too much time it spent in understanding/working on game specific API and its quirks).

2. teaching python on my own letting them download sample data files from kaggle.com and asking them to find avg age of a basketball player. Code is simple, fits in two pages, and does something meaningful. Although, I wish there were more there. Right now, I have to think of challenging but reasonable problems from that dataset.

Any feedback on the paid online courses out there? tynker.com ? udemy?

Thanks

3 comments

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spricket
I'll say this from my experience as a coding kid. If you find your kids have programming interest don't treat them like children when they come to you for help.

I taught myself several languages when I was ~11 but my parents always treated my interest as a curiosity. When I went to them for help they bought me kids books. This held me back because it never went beyond the basics and never explained the fundamentals I was missing like algebra and pointer math. Almost all the kids stuff is "cookbooks" that will give you a working program without explaining why. My biggest breakthrough was getting "the Perl Bible" and a bunch of orielly books on Java for Christmas.

The best kind of teaching is 1:1 tutoriing. Assuming you know programming since you asked this on HN, I think the best thing you could do is train your kids personally as if they were in a CS101 course.

I would teach them just like you would teach an adult. The only difference is they're going to be missing some math and data structure basics. Find their gaps and fill them in, and I think you'll be surprised what they're capable of

harikb
Thanks for your feedback.