I'm the dad of an 11 year old boy and a 8 year old girl. Text IS scary, because it's nontrivial. There's a reason schools start with the ABCs and spend the fir

I'm the dad of an 11 year old boy and a 8 year old girl. Text IS scary, because it's nontrivial. There's a reason schools start with the ABCs and spend the first four years of school teaching kids to read. And even then we don't stop there: middle school focuses on grammar, and high school focuses on creating long-form content. Programming is similar: it's non trivial to stand up a knowledge base to be a programmer. I think the big difference is that most programming classes start in high school or college, well after we've mastered text in general. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. The key is to start small: don't expect novel-sized programs, expect words and sentences, and make those words and sentences FUN. For example, my son has had a TON of fun with the micro:bit [1], and it's scratch based system, and Swift playgrounds. [1] [1] http://microbit.org/ http://microbit.org/ [2] https://developer.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ https://developer.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/