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Programming classes for a 13yr old

1 points by sieva ↗ HN
My sister's middle school doesn't offer any code classes (frustrating). I think in this day and age students should have some sort of in-school option to learn the fundamentals of coding. Most people don't need to be a real coder, but even today I feel a bit naked with no real engineering know-how.

Can you suggest classes/courses or games that might be interesting for a middle school girl? As the big bro, I'm happy to do them with her.

Keep in mind that coding isn't perceived as "cool" by most younger girls. With this in mind, I'm also open to suggestions on the best way to approach her with this topic and encourage her to give it a good try.

5 comments

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stasy
My high school teaches programming (Visual Basic and C#), but I started learning before that. I looked at all the possible ways of development (I eventually chose web development) and bought books from them. I tried learning online, but those did not help. Project based learning is really beneficial, so I recommend that. http://oreilly.com/ has really good books. But just getting the top books on amazon for the language is the best way to find good books. This is if she likes to read a lot and spend a lot of time (years of weekends) on it.
sieva
Thanks! Yes, she's a huge reader so this could be a good route. I've heard that project based learning is the way to go - I just have to think of a project that might catch her attention. She's been a bit turned off by the idea when I brought it up in the past.
011011100
Depends on how motivated she is to learn (or how good of a teacher you are). If you expose too much complexity in the very beginning, you may risk her not liking it from an early age.

I can come up with one idea which would have been super fun for me as a kid (game AI with python, look at Berkeley CS188). But I would have needed a lot of direction. And maybe that idea is overrrkilll.

There are also some flash games which let you do things like programming. But it may not be fun and it exposes no complexity.

There's also this sort of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)

I have no experience with it and I can't say whether a kid would find it fun.

southflorida
My boss showed me this a couple days ago. https://teamtreehouse.com/ It isnt free, but it has incentives for people to finish projects, they try make it fun. I'll probably end up getting it for my daughter.
sieva
Did you try it out? I'm sure it is, but do you know how it is different from Code Academy?