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Maybe she doesn't ... need to learn coding at that age? Really - it's an incredibly over-hyped and overrated skill - especially for the pre-teen set. As in, r
by vanusa 5y ago
Maybe she doesn't ... need to learn coding at that age?
Really - it's an incredibly over-hyped and overrated skill - especially for the pre-teen set. As in, really, really incredibly over-hyped and overrated.
Meanwhile, you could probably get a lot more mileage out of (and less resistance from) teaching "adjacent" skills like strategy games (ideally physical board games rather than the electronic variety -- but the latter can be perfectly fine as well, if tastefully done). You know, chess, go, backgammon, as well as the modern stuff. Anything involving counting, prediction, planning ("if-this-then-that") and spatial reasoning will definitely give hear a leg up in this realm.
That and ... throw a few Rubik's cubes (and its variants), as well as picture-driven math books her way (especially those with fractals and tessellations and such). Any kind of illustrated science book actually. See of these get any traction.
And don't forget -- a decent scientific calculator. That's one of the things that got me into programming at a tender age (specifically 4th grade) -- discovering things like the x -> 1/(1+x) iteration on my own, and so forth.
Ditto for musical "toys" (aka simple electronic instruments), which are of course another form of computational platform.
As for coding -- if she digs any of the above, she'll get to it on her own, sooner or later. If she doesn't dig any of the above ... then maybe it's just not her bag.
Which is of course perfectly fine as well.
- bobbiechen 5y agoI didn't learn how to code until my freshman year of college, and it was intimidating to hear my peers talk about how they had been coding since they were kids. But I did pick it up then, and learned quickly enough that I could do it professionally (maybe the lack of prior bad habits helped there). In hindsight, I had a good half-dozen really good opportunities to learn how to code from elementary school and onwards, but none of them stuck until college. I wrote about that a bit on my blog: https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2021/7/15/opportunities https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2021/7/15/opportunities . I'm perfectly happy not having learned earlier, and I think if someone had been forcing me to write code, there's a good chance I would've rebelled and not even tried it down the line.
- popcube 5y agoyes, op have so many resources for her! mathematics, and maybe real computer science
- smoldesu 5y ago+1 for this. A lot of us look at programming as this holy grail of knowledge for one reason or another, but you have to remember that the process of actually acquiring that knowledge can be extremely soul-crushing and arduous. When I started to take programming seriously, it was only after I had lost all my friends in middle school and had nothing left to lose. It certainly didn't make me any more social, and it certainly didn't improve my life in the way I had expected. Now, halfway up the hill, I don't really appreciate the knowledge I have. For the most part it just makes me paranoid and dysfunctional. That's not to say it's useless, but you really have to let kids decide things on their own volition. Pushing someone into something as banal as programming could have disastrous results if they're not interested.
- bradknowles 5y agoSo, I was a loner to begin with. It was with computers and programming that I made friends and socialized — with the new friend group.
- malshe 5y agoThanks. These are good ideas. I do a lot of math problems with her on a whiteboard in my office and she likes those exercises. I am teaching her how to get a feel for numbers and do calculations in your head, which she is doing really well. I will explore strategy board games as a next step.
- brudgers 5y agoYour child likes spending time with you. Doing problems in your office is time with you. Programming is time with a machine.