4 ms·

Well, I'm still waiting for something to beat the MSWLogo which defined my childhood between 8 and 12 years old. By now I've tried quite a few things with my ki

Well, I'm still waiting for something to beat the MSWLogo which defined my childhood between 8 and 12 years old. By now I've tried quite a few things with my kids and most of them IMO display a complete lack of understanding of what can be good for a 8-10 year old child. E.g. typing "player.move_forward()" instead of "fw" (hi, codingforkids) is complete insanity: kids typically do not master touch typing by that age. Furthermore, with kids using tablets instead of PCs nowadays I doubt most of them will master touch typing at all. Nor do they care about the syntax of ".member" and "func()" for that matter, that's beyond the point when you're just trying to figure out what a procedural program even is. I'm open to recommendations of programming languages and programming-related games for kids between 4 and 12 years old, for Android and PC. This is what I've tried so far: * Scratch is interesting but simple programs like "add two numbers" require crazy levels of dedication of drawing sprites for every digit and programming a character for every decimal place (unless I got it wrong, open for advice). I think it will come handy later to teach about eventloops, signals and threads, but not as a first language. * codingforkids.io -- "papa, but this sucks, you do it all day?" was hard to argue with that * Human Resource Machine -- incredible game and does drill some good concepts but is too remote from programming (I still recommend it though) * Mindustry -- also a good game but is even further away from what programming is compared to HRM * Any other recommendations?

eimrine 2y ago
> kids typically do not master touch typing by that age. That's wrong, I have an experience of learning 9yo touchtyping with Dvorak as the first step to learning both how to program and how to learn English from scratch. It took no more than 6 hours of continuous work or 2 weeks of a full from zero to hero routine.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  I also had experience with brilliant kids during my teaching side-career, but my statement is still true: kids TYPICALLY do not master touch typing by that age. In fact, it's extremely rare based on the kids I know and knew in the past.
  - eimrine 2y ago
    Still wrong, it should not be the kid's choice, it should be the teacher's choice. As well as choose of hardware and OS, it just should not be the kid's choice because all they want by their own choice is consuming the capitalists' dark patterns. BTW adults also typically do not master touchtyping, typically they have some advanced 4-fingers hunt-and-peck approach, and do not have a need to progress.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
WillAdams 2y ago
Blockly? I've been using it BlockSCAD: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ and apparently it can be used in Jupyter notebooks? https://jupyterlab-blockly.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://jupyterlab-blockly.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Or perhaps a node programming system such as: https://nodezator.com/ https://nodezator.com/ https://ryven.org/ https://ryven.org/ or https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor

eimrine 2y ago

> kids typically do not master touch typing by that age. That's wrong, I have an experience of learning 9yo touchtyping with Dvorak as the first step to learning both how to program and how to learn English from scratch. It took no more than 6 hours of continuous work or 2 weeks of a full from zero to hero routine.

alexey-salmin 2y ago
I also had experience with brilliant kids during my teaching side-career, but my statement is still true: kids TYPICALLY do not master touch typing by that age. In fact, it's extremely rare based on the kids I know and knew in the past.
- eimrine 2y ago
  Still wrong, it should not be the kid's choice, it should be the teacher's choice. As well as choose of hardware and OS, it just should not be the kid's choice because all they want by their own choice is consuming the capitalists' dark patterns. BTW adults also typically do not master touchtyping, typically they have some advanced 4-fingers hunt-and-peck approach, and do not have a need to progress.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

WillAdams 2y ago

Blockly? I've been using it BlockSCAD: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ and apparently it can be used in Jupyter notebooks? https://jupyterlab-blockly.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://jupyterlab-blockly.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Or perhaps a node programming system such as: https://nodezator.com/ https://nodezator.com/ https://ryven.org/ https://ryven.org/ or https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor