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My daughter is 9 and has been fascinated by coding since she was about 6 - initially with Scratch, but she's just moving on to Javascript. I didn't push it on

My daughter is 9 and has been fascinated by coding since she was about 6 - initially with Scratch, but she's just moving on to Javascript. I didn't push it on her at all - she asked me one night what I did for a job, so I showed her a bit of code I'd been doing and she was hooked. I've also done an after-school club in Scratch for the kids at her school (9 out of the 10 were girls), and they really enjoyed it as well . Clearly just an anecdote, but the interest is still out there somewhere. And going back to my childhood in the early 80s, there were a group of us who were into coding. But we were very much the nerdy group - it wasn't as if everyone was a budding programmer back then either.

stuxnet79 11y ago
This is pretty cool. You should be proud of your daughter. Mine is 10 going to 11 in a couple of weeks and I've tried getting her interested in programming but no dice. She just prefers gaming, social media, selfies. I wish she was into it =( but I will respect the fact that her destiny might lie somewhere else (or maybe she is just a late bloomer).
- prof_hobart 11y ago
  It's never too late. I didn't start programming until I was about 13 (admittedly, I'd only ever seen one computer - an Apple II - before I bought my Spectrum), but I know a lot of people in IT who didn't start until their late teens or beyond. If you are still keen on getting her interested, have you ever tried something like Scratch? It's very easy to learn and the kids that I've taught it to really seemed to enjoy making silly animations or very simple games with it.
  - stuxnet79 11y ago
    I started my daughter out with Python but she found it too hard, and I think it kinda soured her on programming. I will look into Scratch and see if she will find that a bit more appealing. She recently did a "coding with Minecraft" thing at school, which is very "Scratch"-like, and she enjoyed it a lot.

stuxnet79 11y ago

This is pretty cool. You should be proud of your daughter. Mine is 10 going to 11 in a couple of weeks and I've tried getting her interested in programming but no dice. She just prefers gaming, social media, selfies. I wish she was into it =( but I will respect the fact that her destiny might lie somewhere else (or maybe she is just a late bloomer).

prof_hobart 11y ago
It's never too late. I didn't start programming until I was about 13 (admittedly, I'd only ever seen one computer - an Apple II - before I bought my Spectrum), but I know a lot of people in IT who didn't start until their late teens or beyond. If you are still keen on getting her interested, have you ever tried something like Scratch? It's very easy to learn and the kids that I've taught it to really seemed to enjoy making silly animations or very simple games with it.
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  I started my daughter out with Python but she found it too hard, and I think it kinda soured her on programming. I will look into Scratch and see if she will find that a bit more appealing. She recently did a "coding with Minecraft" thing at school, which is very "Scratch"-like, and she enjoyed it a lot.