

Teaching My Daughter To Code - muriithi
http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/mik/2008/01/20/teaching-my-daughter-to-code/

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mattmcknight
I installed scratch for my daughter, when she was 5. She did a lot of simple
things that were like Flash animations. Now that she is 7, she is creating
some more complex games, and tons of ideas for games. We've been messing
around with Google App Inventor for Android as well, which uses the same
framework. She does a lot of MS Office work in school, including Excel
formulas, but they don't seem to tackle actual coding early enough.

Our next projects will probably involve doing some web development and then
perhaps Mindstorms.

My first experience in programming was reverse engineering the programs that
ran on the TRS-80 we had at school to change the names of the characters in
the exercises to be other kids and teachers and allow me to get the high
scores on the games. It's a little harder to imagine people starting that way
with the complexity of a lot of the software that we interact with, but I
tried to give her a flavor for that by modifying some of the image files that
came with the games she has installed.

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kadavy
I think it's a good strategy to start with something like Flash. Personally,
as I was learning to complement my design skills with programming skills _,
Flash was a great entry point because it was fun.

It's much more motivating if, by writing a couple of lines of code, you can
make a ball bounce - than, say, publishing text or solving math problems.

(_at the not-so-tender age of 23)

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obsessive1
My first (real) programming experience was with PHP when I was 14. Before
that, I fiddled around with a bit of flash and ActionScript. I found it so
much easier to learn by actually having a project and working out how to make
it a reality as opposed to just reading about it in a book.

~~~
homonculus
I'm 15 and using PHP. It is very satisfying to use, especially after the
depression and boredom of school.

I wish I had started younger, the way some of these other kids did.

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Luyt
A long time ago, I also made these kinds of programs. That was on a PET 2001,
and I didn't have the luxury of bitmaps back then. I would use the PET's
graphic characters as 'actors', and POKE them to the video memory. It started
with simple balls, but soon my 'actors' grew into sprites made up from
multiple characters (with a square, a few line graphics and a ball you could
make a little fellow). POKEing all these characters from BASIC became a bit
slow, and that was the moment I started learning machine language ( _necessity
is the mother of invention_ ), and from then on I wrote my PET games in 6502
assembly. That made them blindingly fast! (And very prone to crashing, too ;-)

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jluxenberg
Reminds me of Turtle Graphics from Logo ( <http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-
foundation/logo/turtle.html> ). Interesting that programming at this basic
level has been unchanged for so long...I guess that means we got it right at
the beginning!

~~~
anarchitect
I have fond memories of using Turtle in primary school. It had much more of a
positive impact on me than re-typing code from a book into my Amstrad
CPC-6128!

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fsniper
This reminds me the story that my deceased father told me. Once upon a time
when the c64's reigned in Turkey, He asks me to write down some of the
programs distributed with Commodore magazines. Yes, these magazines consisting
of 5-6 pages full of GW-Basic code and which are mostly incorrect or
incomplete :) And he adds, "Than you who never stands up from the desk did not
touched the computer at least a month" :)

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spektom
Brad Fitzpatrick says in "Coders at Work" that his father taught him to
program when he was 5 years old.

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nhangen
This is cool. My son is 8 and I'm trying to get him interested in learning
code, but right now he can't draw the line between code and the games he
plays.

~~~
jlees
Find a game where you can easily edit a save file, map file or high score
table and let him poke about in it...

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Cushman
I was learning C when I was six years old. Definitely helped that my older
brother (then 11) was the one teaching me— I wonder if having young children
learn from older children might be good advice in general?

~~~
ig1
I first coded when I was about the same age, but at that point it was mostly
type out programs from magazines and making minor tweaks (this was in Atari
Basic). When I was 9-10 I was writing my own simple games in Amiga Basic and
later CanDo. When I was 13 I started learning K&R C and then later Quest-C (A
VB like tool for C).

I remember there was one other kid in my year at school who was better at C
than me at the time, so I don't think I was that unusual.

I think it easy to underestimate what kids are capable of.

~~~
jlees
I was typing out BASIC programs when I was around 6, got to love growing up
with the Spectrum/C64 and the wonderful BBC Micro. I think it worked well; I
still remember it being so magical (a since overused word sadly), and a lot of
my early tweaking was PEEKing and POKEing around in games to cheat.

The OP has it right -- if you're doing something you want (building a Dr Who
game, changing your high score, turning all the baddies into strawberries,
making a spider run around the screen to scare your mum) that's the best, dare
I say only, way to learn.

Having said this, nobody at my school could program at all (despite the BBC's
best efforts). I didn't learn "real" programming until university; web
scripting and PHP before that. Maybe that's why I'm such a hacky coder even
now.

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ianp
Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pyRL80h...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pyRL80hQAAIJ:blogs.kent.ac.uk/mik/2008/01/20/teaching-
my-daughter-to-code/+http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/mik/2008/01/20/teaching-my-
daughter-to-code/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&ie=UTF-8)

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giantsquid
Should of used dependency injection

