Good books for kids/teens

Hey folks, I'm trying to get my kids away from playing video games and long story short I started talking to them about programming to make their own games rather than playing them. I always say random things that usually get ignored, but this time they both started asking questions and I directed them to codeacademy.com and code.org. Well, they've been on both sites for a week now and I want to continue the momentum. Anyone have any suggestions for good kids books on programming? I'm not particular on language, just want them to get the basics of logic and such then they can go ahead and choose their language to learn. I've been browsing through Amazon and have seen a ton of books, but I figure I tap into the collective resources here to see if anyone else has successfully hooked their kids on programming and what resources they used.

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Comments

paul78

Great topic... How old are your kids? I have also been looking to do the same thing. One of the things that I've been looking at is Scratch. It is designed at MIT Media Lab for learning and education. It is geared at kids from 8 years old up.

You can find more info here - About Scratch | Scratch Documentation Site

About7Narwhal

As a student, I hated Scratch. That said, it did a very good job of walking through the basics. You might want to look into ALICE as well.

fiftyo

You could try this site https://www.khanacademy.org/cs/
However, I'm not too sure about the difficulty level of these. Anyway, there's this achievement system, where you earn different achievements based on how fast you answer the questions of some of the exercises, how long you've watched videos etc. I myself use this for math, and I find it very useful in that regard(clear explainations etc.). But as stated before, I'm not too sure about the CS part, but it's definitely worth checking out!

NotHackingYou

Try anything from the Head First series. In the C# book, most of the chapters revolve around building games

spicy ahi

paul78 wrote: »

Great topic... How old are your kids? I have also been looking to do the same thing. One of the things that I've been looking at is Scratch. It is designed at MIT Media Lab for learning and education. It is geared at kids from 8 years old up.

You can find more info here - About Scratch | Scratch Documentation Site

@Paul78 - My two knuckleheads are 12 and 13. I was actually looking into that as an amazon search for kids programming listed a good number of books for scratch. I ended up ordering this book for my son. My daughter had also mentioned that she learned a little bit of python at school for a project so I ended up getter her this book since it's something she's already seen. My hope is that the comic book style will pique my sons interest since he has the attention span of a sparrow (being that he's autistic and has ADHD) My daughter is a bit more focused so I'm hoping she does something cool that'll again pique my sons interest. Thanks for the link.

@About7Narwhal - I looked into Alice too, but didn't find too many book resources that were written with younger kids in mind. Maybe I'll revisit it if programming sticks with one of these two. Thanks.

@fiftyo - Thanks for the link. I'll take a look.

@CalSaiyad - I'll also look into those as they become more proficient in programming.