Ask HN: Programmers with kids, how are you teaching your kids programming? - geetfun
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dawidw
I've bought my kids (4 and 6):

1\. Learning Resources Code & Go Robot Mouse Activity Set 2\. The Official
ScratchJr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code

They really like playing that. They are at the age that nothing lasts long
though. Both are lot of fun and laugh - especially when mouse gets out of
board and can't find the cheese (dummy mouse! hahaha!). And in application you
can do crazy stuff, including your kids' funny voices etc.

Play, have fun (and the kids will not be aware of learning of logical
thinking).

[1]
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01A5YMCH4/ref=oh_aui_de...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01A5YMCH4/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

[2]
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1593276710/ref=oh_aui_de...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1593276710/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

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cevanwells
I have only briefly started with my kids, but I have tried two methods so far.

The first method was with my 12yr old. She wanted to learn programming so I
got her signed up on Exercism.IO in the Python track. She did pretty well but
then lost steam (actually we both kind of did) within a few weeks.

The second method I used was with my 14yr old. She had a science fair project
that required a VOC sensor. We planned the project, ordered the pieces and
then coded an Arduino sketch together.

I personally feel like method two had the best results. Project based
learning, in general, seems to hold the attention of both the student and the
teacher far more effectively. Further, I think we often forget that
programming is a tool; a means to some end. If that end is something we
strongly desire to achieve we will be more willing to trudge through the
somewhat dry and boring aspects of introductory programming.

</2cents>

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yalok
I tried a few times to start teaching my son coding, since he was 3 maybe -
and at first the problem was with math, then with reading, and later on, once
he could read and do math, it turned out that motivation is a big problem.
Having such an easy access to games on his iPad and MacBook (even within the
screen time limits), never made sense to him why he should need to code
himself. It just looked boring.

This year, however, when he was still 10, something changed, and he got pretty
interested to go through the coding course in Khan Academy
([https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-
programming](https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming)). He
has been doing math there for a couple of years, so it was a natural
additional course. I was amazed at how well the coding course is built there,
with good explanation videos and a sandbox coding editor, which prompts on
errors in real-time and displays results immediately in adjacent window.

His other interest came from Roblox, where he likes to play with friends, and
that has a Roblox studio to build your own game. You can build your own world
in this studio just like in Minecraft, but to add game logic to it, you need
to add scripts. The problem there however is that it uses Lua for scripting
language, which is not as easy for me to help him with, and the API to access
different parts/objects of the game requires lots of Googling and
understanding of the Roblox architecture. So far, I’ve been writing some short
code for him (with lots of googling), and he was modifying it to fit his game
needs. But hopefully he gets it eventually to it himself.

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segmondy
I don't. Who says they want to program? If they express such interest then
sure, but until then, expose them to as many experiences as possible. There's
more to life than programming, just because I enjoy it doesn't mean that
other's do or need to.

