
Choosing a First Programming Language for Kids and Beginners - 4mpm3
https://medium.com/young-coder/choosing-a-first-programming-language-for-kids-and-beginners-faf7059bbd93
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moksly
I think the best way to teach kids about programming is giving them a Micro-
Bit and letting them build whatever they want with it. Maybe they want to make
games on it, maybe they want to setup a mini weather station, all that’s
viable with it and the national program we’ve had running in Denmark for a
while now, has likely been the most successful of its kind. I think the Micro-
bit has something similar to scratch as well as Python and JavaScript, but I
think language is a lot less important than the fact that you can build
something useful/fun relatively quick. This way programming becomes a “hobby”
class like astronomy was to most of us before it turned out to be all math. ;)

For CS students I’ve seen a lot of approaches. I’m an external examiner and as
such I get to go through the “intro” courses two times a year, often with
different languages and philosophies. The one I liked the best, was a school
that copier Harvard’s approach. They start by giving students a basic
understanding of how the computer works, as well as the aching basic
computation with scratch. Then they move on to C, using what they’ve just
learned about computers and computation in a manner that has the students
building things like cyphers and crackers, and then they go into C# (could be
python/java/ruby/jot lib/go/whatever but C# is big in Denmark so it makes
sense here because it’ll help students get jobs). I’m a big fan of JavaScript
because of how universal it is, and how easy it is to get a development setup
running, but I think using C and computation together quickly teaches students
how computers and programming languages works, which will be very valuable to
them when they move on to building things in whatever they do. The students
coming from that particular school are almost always better at first year CS
than their competition who started out with JAVA/C#/Python, at least in my
opinion.

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4mpm3
We have a micro:bit and I agree that it's lots of fun. The ability to see your
code have an effect in the real world is especially compelling for 8-11 year
olds. There are many more possibilities available if you use the Raspberry Pi,
as well.

