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What is a good intro programming class for a 14-year-old?

2 points by squokko ↗ HN
My niece is excited to learn programming but about to get scammed into paying for an expensive course. What’s a good free course that’s mostly hands on and applied - prefer starting with a working program rather than with pointers and structs.

9 comments

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jstx1
CS50

> prefer starting with a working program rather than with pointers and structs.

It starts with Scratch. And then gets into lower level C stuff and back to higher level Python/JavaScript/SQL.

aaronrobinson
I’m teaching my daughter at the moment. She started with (free) codeacademy courses and like these because of the tests. She then went onto codewars - also free. It has any language you can think of, has 8 levels of challenges. Allows you to write your own tests and to run their test sweet to determine if it passes. For each submission you can see other people’s answers and sort them by things like cleverness. Great to learn from. She really enjoyed this format. She is now working through FrontEndMasters web dev stream and enjoying the format. She had an assessment today with a bootcamp and smashed it after just 4 weeks full time learning.