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Teens/Childs quickly loose interest in something. Find out what they find "hip" or cool, don't expect it to be what you find cool. I would rather support them t
by ktpsns 7y ago
Teens/Childs quickly loose interest in something. Find out what they find "hip" or cool, don't expect it to be what you find cool. I would rather support them to program their own Instagram app then to propose them to some hardware programming environment (thinking of educational boards) if they don't like it.
Also, learning programming was applied autodidactics for most of us, isn't it? My feeling is that this is the only really working way of learning programming (have worked 10y in university, teaching programming: Doesn't work well).
It really depends on your kids and on your relationship to them. Maybe you should present them a vast amount of programmable devices and interfaces to explore together interesting projects.
- rchaud 7y agoIt's the content on IG that's fun, not the app itself. Take it from me, someone who half-learned JS and PHP through extremely tedious "build your own FB" tutorials that took 2 hours of setup work (VirtualBox, MAMP, MySQL DB setup, etc etc) before you even started "coding". At best they will end up with something not much more than a static website that can accept image uploads. Forget about live video, stories and the stuff people actually use on IG. I think a simple game would be better. Easier to see results early on, at which point you can dive deeper into the mechanics of what's happening.
- ktpsns 7y agoYou nail it: I find "Instagram" as an application interesting, because it can be approached really easy (file upload and viewer). That even you don't find it interesting anymore supports my point that it should be the kids who decide what to code. I never had an interest in developing games. When I learned JS and PHP (~15yrs ago), I created tons of dynamical websites which nobody used, but which were fun to code.