Teaching children how to code.

N2IT

As you get older (myself included) I am trying to pass the knowledge onto my kids. My father was really bad about hoarding his carpentry knowledge and boy was he is amazing. Now he is told old and I consider that opportunity to have passed by.

So often we get caught up in ourselves, but there are millions, billions of kids out there who you can make a difference in. I am starting with my own kids right now.

It's been a few days and we are working through some math problems in IDLE. (Python). They are excited about moving on to the chapters of learning how to make games. I feel my 11 year old who is going into the 6th grade and my son going into 1st grade need more exposure to development. They seem to really like controlling the computer and watching their code execute. You can see the excitement in there face.

She loves earth and life sciences, which when she graduates will require development knowledge just like any professional IMO. Agile development can only go so far, eventually the knowledge worker is going to have to know how to write code. I see it like you having to rely on a admin assistant to write your emails for you. The logic and language will need to be picked up.

Thoughts? Have you started doing this?

The funny thing is that as I teach my kids more and more about logic and python, syntax, semantics etc the more I learn.

It's really cool and I wanted to share this. It's a lot of fun!

We are working out of a Python for kids book. We tried the C# course on plural sight for kids but we all move at different paces, so the book is a better method of learning. Of course so is writing the code out.

Thanks for reading and I hope some of you all participate.

LauraMalave

PluralSight has free courses for kids: Teaching kids to program, Learning to Program with Scratch, Learning to build apps with App Inventor, and Learn to Program Kudo Kingdom Defense.

N2IT

I tried the CBT approach but I have 2 kids both at different levels. Projectizing the task seems to work better for comprehension and retaining the information.

We fire up the book and work through a project together. Son, daughter and myself. I find the critical thinking develops as well.

YFZblu

That's awesome, I'm a huge believer that we need to give kids this type of interaction early on. Especially for little girls, who are inundated with play toys that cry and piss themselves, barbie dolls, etc.

Additionally, numbering systems like hex and binary are low-hanging fruit for young kids, and can be really valuable later on.

N2IT

They are both strong in mathematics for their respective ages, so while we are working on strings and concatenation etc, I am focusing more on functions and assigning values to a variable and using it for a math problem. Even basics, additional, subtraction, multiplication and division.

I am working with them on straight line programs right now, boring for sure, but I am still trying to build their confidence up.

Eventually we can move onto loop techniques and branching. The boy is only 6 but has an understanding of variables. It should be a good time!

Plantwiz

Learntocode.com

Used it with some third graders, they seemed to enjoy it and a few were enjoying the thought process of coding (enough to write it out before using the click and drag to setup the event).