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Ask HN: How would you teach kids to program?
A few of my kids (ages 14, 12, 9) have been on my case to teach them how to program. I thought I would start them out with a few simple problems in lisp and see where it goes. I do most of my work using c++ making video games but c++ seems too cumbersome to start with. So how would you go about it?
- aitoehigie 18y agoStart with Python, its easy to understand and very versatile. when they get older, they will thank you for it.
- te_platt 18y agoChoosing the right language is only part of the question. What kind of problems do you think make for a good start?
- blogimus 18y agoWhat kind of problems do your kids want to solve? Find something that will drive them. Do they want to make a website on your home network? There is something with some basically immediate gratification that can grow as they learn.
- davidw 18y agoSomething that interests them - a concrete project that can be wrapped up without going on for too long, and without requiring too much help from dad. Something visual or something with effects in the real world might be neat, but it probably depends on them. Python's probably a pretty good language to start with.
- blogimus 18y agoFirst I'd like to mention that I like the toys ideas mentioned here as a tactile introduction. How did you learn to program? (Seriously, I'd like to know how fellow News.YC members learned) I think for kids the most natural and fun way is to be self-taught, but have resources available to answer questions. I had an Atari 400 and eventually got bored with the games and wanted to program, so I put in the Atari Basic cartridge, looked at the graphics examples and started coding them in, then changing them, then writing my own stuff. I was completely self taught until I took a computer camp in the 7th grade and was exposed to mainframe computing and APL. That experience added to the base I had already established. The only downside to my experience is that I was exposed first to spaghetti code and did not learn to shun goto until after intro to computer science.
- te_platt 18y agoFunny, I started on an Atari 400 too. I had a couple of older brothers that showed me a few things in Basic but I wish I had someone giving me better directions.
- blogimus 18y agoThat whopping 2K ram barrier forced me to be creative, and that awful touchpad. I could never get the tape drive to work properly, so I would keep the system up for days or weeks at a time. Its funny that Syracuse University had this mainframe system and I was mostly interested in playing with one of the Atari 800 computers at Bird Library (I think, its been a while)
- gexla 18y agoTake a look at the Mindstorm robot building kits from Lego. You can involve the kids in both the hardware and the software and let them figure out which side is most interesting. Perhaps not the absolute best way to learn programming, but it looks like a fun start.
- kleevr 18y agoThere is also that battle bots Java programming game IBM created.