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Learning Simple Programming for a Ten Year Old?

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sokoloff:
I'm a little surprised to see no one recommended scratch yet:
https://scratch.mit.edu/

My kids both took right to it and you can get a lot done that's graphical and interactive well before they get bored. I think they were doing it when they were 7 and 9, maybe. There's a lot of online scratch examples, you can examine other people's code and see how they did things, plenty of YouTube tutorials, and a kind of mashup of some of the best of old 8-bit BASIC, Logo, Hypercard, blockly-style programming, and good support for sprites with an actor model under the covers.

Here's one we did together following a tutorial but then doing some extensions and customizations ourselves. (I'm not going to deny that I had a heavy role in keeping them unstuck or helping figure out what was going wrong, but they did all the driving on the keyboard and, based on projects they did afterwards alone, they understood most of what was going on.)

Brick-breaker game in Scratch

Another one that the kids did much more on their own:
Rainbow Chase

MikeK:
Karel?  Logo?

BrianHG:

--- Quote from: MikeK on November 12, 2022, 01:33:19 am ---Karel?  Logo?

--- End quote ---
Yes, I learned 'Logo' in school before I learned Atari Basic.

Smokey:
I was thinking about a similar thing over the summer.
It didn't end up happening, but I was leaning towards something to do with Python and Minecraft to relate it to something they are already excited about.  The Minecraft resources are ok, but I feel like it makes the basics of programming ideas a little convoluted since you need to interact with libraries from the beginning. 

I wasn't sure how well a command line python interpreter by itself would keep their interest to get through the whole "what is a variable, what is a for loop" type core lessons.

fourfathom:

--- Quote from: eti on November 12, 2022, 12:03:43 am ---I'd advise to skip that sterile, toxic and egotistical path (look at silicon valley types for confirmation of this) and maybe guide him into a PROPER engineering career, one where laws of physics.and constants are engineered, Vs the weekly whims of some gen X "engineer" at Google.

Stand him in good stead by lighting the fire of enthusiasm for PHYSICAL WORLD OBJECTS & it's far more rewarding.

--- End quote ---

Wow, eti, who pissed in your cornflakes?

I can't tell if your "sterile, toxic and egotistical" pejorative is directed at me, or software in general, or something else, so before I take offence I'm going to ask you nicely if you would care to explain this in more detail.

I'm not trying to turn my ten-tear-old grandson into a programmer, or an engineer -- that would be stupid and cruel.  I just wanted to give him the opportunity to learn a little more about logic and numbers than he is currently getting in school.  BASIC came to mind because I remember learning this simple, linear, essentially english-language, programming language and thought it might be an accessible way to familiarize a young boy with concepts such as IF, THEN, ELSE (FOR/NEXT can come later), and give him the chance to explore elementary-school math in a fun way.  If he wants to go further that's great, but that's up to him.

I currently design RF and digital gear, use Verilog, and code in C and C#.  There is no way I would try to teach my grandson that stuff at his age.

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