4 ms·

There's already a lot of good advice here, but I really wanted to emphasize Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/) as a first step. A 7 yea

There's already a lot of good advice here, but I really wanted to emphasize Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/) as a first step. A 7 year old (2nd grader) and 9 year old (4th grader) should be able to navigate their way through Scratch. Start off by following the tutorial on the right panel when you create a new project. Once you're done with that, your cousins will probably be exploring on their own. Help their exploration by printing out some Scratch Cards (https://scratch.mit.edu/info/cards/ https://scratch.mit.edu/info/cards/). After they go through those, check out the Harvard Scratch curriculum (http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide/ http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide/). There's full of exercises and activities in it. By now you can tell if your cousins actually wants to learn to code. If they do, they'll be building things in Scratch on their own and remixing other people's examples. I can go further as to next steps, but this should be plenty of material to get started :)

rixed 10y ago
Similar but better than scratch: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language Better because portable, works offline, and the language itself is more sane (although I haven't checked recent versions of scratch)
mbubb 10y ago
I had positive experience teaching kids scratch in an afterschool club environment. The Turtle library in Python is a good transition to show them things that Scratch cannot (its limited in terms of what you can do with variables , lists, etc)
- rickyc091 10y ago
  For a Python version of Scratch you can actually try out https://www.codesters.com https://www.codesters.com. It's python with drag and drop blocks similar to Scratch, but you actually write real python code. It's a great transition. Thanks for the reminder! I forgot that another neat thing about Scratch is that it connects with different modules such as littlebits, arduino, etc. This allows them to integrate hardware with the games they build and paves the way to circuits, etc. Edit. Adding info about Scratch extensions.

rixed 10y ago

Similar but better than scratch: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language Better because portable, works offline, and the language itself is more sane (although I haven't checked recent versions of scratch)

mbubb 10y ago

I had positive experience teaching kids scratch in an afterschool club environment. The Turtle library in Python is a good transition to show them things that Scratch cannot (its limited in terms of what you can do with variables , lists, etc)

rickyc091 10y ago
For a Python version of Scratch you can actually try out https://www.codesters.com https://www.codesters.com. It's python with drag and drop blocks similar to Scratch, but you actually write real python code. It's a great transition. Thanks for the reminder! I forgot that another neat thing about Scratch is that it connects with different modules such as littlebits, arduino, etc. This allows them to integrate hardware with the games they build and paves the way to circuits, etc. Edit. Adding info about Scratch extensions.