Ask HN: My 14 yr old sister wants to learn to program. Best option?

5 points by famousactress 14y ago ↗ HN

I've been developing software professionally for a long time. Mostly server, SaaS, web stuff in the healthcare space. My half-sister is 14 years old, extremely computer literate, and an avid gamer (WoW, and some other MMORPG stuff that I'm not familiar with).

She's recently come to an understanding about where games come from, and wants to learn to program. Of course, she's interested in game development. The Intro-to-Programming, and AP Computer Science classes at her high school have been cancelled.. and I'm struggling to find the best path for her. Like a lot of kids her age, she doesn't always stick to things she gets interested in, and I'd really like to set her up with the best possible chance of having an encouraging experience.

She wants to take a class that's structured and scheduled, since she's already struggled with some self-paced online tutorials, etc. I think an ideal setup for her would be a curriculum that's targeted to people her age, and uses exercises that get her building programs that do something more fun than multiplying matrices.

She lives in the San Diego area, in case that's helpful.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

8 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 35.4 ms ] thread

laconian 14y ago ↗

How about having her learn Lua? It's a nice interpreted language with just a handful of bad quirks, and she can get some practical experience by writing simple mods for games when she gets good enough. Maybe you could help her get the environment up and running so she just has to duplicate a folder and tweak the files inside.

dpakrk 14y ago ↗

http://codeyear.com/

arandomJohn 14y ago ↗

Get her an old copy of Kids and the Commodore 64 and a Commodore 64. Then she'll be retro cool.

brudgers 14y ago ↗

Kudo from Microsoft Reasearch might be an option.

http://fuse.microsoft.com/page/kodu

sebphfx 14y ago ↗

what about eloquent Javascript with the embedded console for the exemples http://eloquentjavascript.net/contents.html. Or Dive into Python.Starting Python at the command line is easy. edit: I didn't read the whole comment so I didn't see the structured part.These books would'nt be that good then.

corysama 14y ago ↗

Sounds like what she really needs is a local class or club that she can attend regularly. If anyone in San Diego knows of one, that would be a great help!

Not being from San Diego, all I can do is point to possibly better self-paced online tutorials. I'd recommend http://inventwithpython.com/chapters/ first. If she can get through that, she can graduate to using http://www.pygame.org

Otherwise, there's http://www.codecademy.com/ and http://primerlabs.com/codehero

Gryftr 14y ago ↗

http://www.fablabsd.org/

pasbesoin 14y ago ↗

Discuss with her and agree on / set a specific goal and then guide her towards that.

As of a year or three ago, there was a lot of consensus around Python being a good choice in a scenario like this.

Help her to quickly accomplish concrete things. Let those rewards provide further motivation.

Drop a few bucks on good resources, if and as needed (books, IDE, etc.). Enable her to quickly find and absorb high signal/noise ratio information -- as opposed to going on frustrating treasure hunts for it.