How young can a child learn to program?<p>While I'm not ready to indoctrinate my four-year-old into the monkhood of true geekery while he's getting in his prime running around time, I was curious to see how logically he could think. My layman's knowledge was that children began properly interpreting and creating rules around the age of six, while four was still wild imagination territory.<p>For my experiment, I created an extremely minimal programming game, like a very stripped-down version of RoboRally:
<a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5458223/robot_factory.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5458223/robot_factory.jp...</a><p>The image depicted is doctored. We had already completed four playthroughs the night before with a similar setup, however. He was able to figure out how to program the robot to collect all of its pieces (three Duplo blocks comprised the robot; successful completion of the robot wins the game). I demonstrated the rules once, and then let him try to play by himself with minimal guidance. One interesting strategy he discovered was placing the "instructions" (the cards with arrows) on the game board in order to create a path.
<a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5458223/robot_factory_redux.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5458223/robot_factory_re...</a><p>A few weeks later, we played it again, and I taught him how to make new "instruction cards". We're not yet at the place where we've done anything with variables and abstraction.
Apparently he liked the game well enough, because he independently recreated it at school:
I don't have kids, but even if I had this entry would still be totally worthless for me. It's touching and nice, but can anyone learn anything from it? I don't really think that there are any useful tips on teaching 7 year old anything, I would even say that it's quite opposite, how could anyone post code like this in such context:
@property (nonatomic) IBOutlet UILabel* label; ?
This has been a super fun thing in our house: <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://scratch.mit.edu/</a> It's also something a 7 year old can use on his or her own to learn concepts and make fun stuff.
This is brilliant and amazing to read.<p>What comes to mind is, we need a list of analogies in the most simplest form so that we can explain fundamentals like variables to kids. Hell, anyone who doesn't know how to code really!<p>75. HN reads and smiles
I think it's great that the author found something that worked for him and his daughter, but this particular example seens a little complex. The first code I ever wrote was something like<p>10 PRINT "HELLO"<p>20 GOTO 10<p>That's 3 or 4 steps. No IDE, no GUI, no variables. A program I could re-create completely on my own the next day.
I wrote a post some time back on teaching my kids to code, thought I'd include it here in case anyone found it useful.<p><a href="http://richiekhoo.com/post/18723300657/coding-with-kids" rel="nofollow">http://richiekhoo.com/post/18723300657/coding-with-kids</a>
Every now and then I do "math" with my son (5 years now).<p>I just use a terminal and "bc". He loves to type in numbers and + or * and see the result. And for + we "guess" ahead of time what the result will be.<p>What amazed me early on: bc has variables. I explained it to him and somehow he immediately got it. You say A is 5 and B is 1 then A + B is 6.<p>His attention span is usually around 5 minutes, but each time it's fun.
My 6 year old and I often boot up the old 8-bit machine that I have reserved in a corner of my lab just for this purpose. I have to say - there is no better way to teach a 6-year old to code than to fire up a BASIC-running 8-bit machine from the 80's and let 'em at it. Something so satisfying about hearing him read out his code .. "10 ... do this .. 20 .. do that .." ;)
That's one of doing it...the other would be something like this [1]. Not ashamed to say I had to beat the whole thing the first time I saw it because it was so brilliant. And I normally hate pointless puzzle games.<p><a href="http://light-bot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://light-bot.com/</a>
Check out Hopscotch:<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hopscotch-coding-for-kids/id617098629?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hopscotch-coding-for-kids/id...</a>
The author correctly says 'pieces of lego' into the cup - but previously says 'playing with their legos'. I'm sure they wouldn't say 'the children were looking at the sheeps', and then later on say 'the children counted the sheep'.<p>For whatever reason, this irks me when reading as a grammar error. It's like a klaxxon sounding in the middle of the sentence.