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As other comments have mentioned, Scratch is great for younger children. I've had some success teaching basic Scratch concepts to 5 year olds, although they va

As other comments have mentioned, Scratch is great for younger children. I've had some success teaching basic Scratch concepts to 5 year olds, although they vary a lot in willingness to play with it. If nothing else, showing them the cool set of sprites and showing them how to make fun backgrounds will keep them entertained enough to start introducing programming concepts. It helped that I was working with a group, so the kids having more trouble could see the neat things some of the others were doing to get them motivated. By 7, they should be able to work with pretty much all the fundamental tools in Scratch and you can start introducing them to higher order constructs. I've found that for young kids the social aspect can be very motivating. If she has friends of a similar age, get them all started on it and they'll soon be showing each other what they come up with. If that doesn't work, then you provide the social reinforcement :)

drbawb 14y ago
Ditto for the social aspect. For me, I was a bit older [6th-8th graders], but my social experience was FIRST Lego League [FLL]. Basically, the FIRST robotics competition also sponsors competitions for middle schoolers to build LEGO robots using the Mindstorms kit [when I did it, it came with the yellow RCX "brain", now they use the NXT and some more advanced sensors/motors]. The social aspect helped bind our team's programmers & "hardware engineers" together. I was always terrible at building things w/o direction, and some kids weren't great at programming. However, when you all have to work together, you start looking at each other for guidance. Seeing the robot take shape eventually led me to learn about gearing and transmissions. Other kids weren't great at programming, but when you see your hardware do wildly unexpected things, you stop and ask "woah, wait, why did it do that? [programmer], show me why it did that!" -- When they see their hardware misbehave, they start to learn what the power of software really is, and vice versa. That and it's a great precursor to FIRST, which I regrettably never got to participate in.

drbawb 14y ago

Ditto for the social aspect. For me, I was a bit older [6th-8th graders], but my social experience was FIRST Lego League [FLL]. Basically, the FIRST robotics competition also sponsors competitions for middle schoolers to build LEGO robots using the Mindstorms kit [when I did it, it came with the yellow RCX "brain", now they use the NXT and some more advanced sensors/motors]. The social aspect helped bind our team's programmers & "hardware engineers" together. I was always terrible at building things w/o direction, and some kids weren't great at programming. However, when you all have to work together, you start looking at each other for guidance. Seeing the robot take shape eventually led me to learn about gearing and transmissions. Other kids weren't great at programming, but when you see your hardware do wildly unexpected things, you stop and ask "woah, wait, why did it do that? [programmer], show me why it did that!" -- When they see their hardware misbehave, they start to learn what the power of software really is, and vice versa. That and it's a great precursor to FIRST, which I regrettably never got to participate in.