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I agree with this post. Most of the young 6-12 year olds out there aren't going to be really interested in a terminal/basic interpreter. A lot of what that audi
by tmm84 5y ago
I agree with this post. Most of the young 6-12 year olds out there aren't going to be really interested in a terminal/basic interpreter. A lot of what that audience wants to do is build mods for the games they play. Minecraft, fortnite, etc. and the like. But programming for these games is a bit more involved than regular programming obviously. I suggest getting them a computer that is capable of playing the game they like and helping them setup the environment for making mods (this is probably something young adults can do on their own but definitely not 6-12 year olds with little experience/patience). And, I think being there as the one learning it with them and understanding what is needed is going to help. I would highly suggest purchasing a book centered on minecraft modding or the like (they seem to be really popular at least the bookstore near me), as this will give you the knowledge to help your child(ren) make mods. I suggest the favorite game modding because it is something both the child and their friends will actually appreciate/use/play with.
- asddubs 5y agominecraft modding is doable with some help. obviously more complex than writing some little BASIC program from scratch since you're hooking into existing things that are at times not ideally documented but it's a lot more feasible than trying to teach your kid unity, probably
- bmj 5y agoThere are plenty of tutorials available out there, with some geared toward kids with no programming experience. My older son went through a class (can't remember which one...it was at least six years ago) that did a very nice job of making basic Minecraft mods very accessible, while still introducing programming topics.
- asddubs 5y agoplus it's java, so it's something they can actually carry on to use in the future, rather than some proprietary custom script language with wildly different syntax than anything else. it's even got strict typing!
- skeeter2020 5y agothe minecraft modding experience on the raspberry pi my pre-teen has is dead simple to get working, with a quick code-observe loop, but then there's a gap moving to java mods on the PC, which is much more involved
- fallat 5y agoModding is actually an excellent catalyst to begin the programming path or other similar paths... Great suggestion!
- helen___keller 5y agoAgreed with modding. In the early aughts my dad encouraged me to learn basic but I was more into playing games and I didn’t see the connection to basic which seemed to me to be mostly about printing text. But at some point, my favorite game involved a scriptable server engine, and nothing brought me joy like updating the game that I had poured hundreds of hours into, with a simple line of text. After that I went back to mainstream games like WoW and didn’t do anything like programming again until college (minus an attempt at AP computer science which I dropped because it was boring)