General > General Technical Chat
Learning Simple Programming for a Ten Year Old?
Smokey:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on November 25, 2022, 11:31:01 pm ---For Python, I warmly recommend starting early with PySDL2 and/or Qt5 (PyQt5 or PySide2), ...
--- End quote ---
GUI developers are the least happy of all software people. If you aren't going to stick to embedded systems, at least teach the kids how to be a back end developer. No GUI required :)
(I'm kidding... sort of...)
Nominal Animal:
Sure, but you're not going to spark a today's kid's imagination with "Hello world". You need something more visual, or that has somehow some other impact.
Having the computer print "Hello, Smokey" on the screen is as interesting to them as us typing the same on a typewriter would have been.
Fun for maybe thirty seconds, but that's it. After that, it'd be only interesting if one is interested in the typography; and today's kids quite fast find the knobs to switch the font on the terminal...
I think of it as the "This is the real deal, kiddo" -approach. Show that imagination is the only limit. And then let the kid lead where their imagination and motivation takes them, just being the mentor and helper along the way. Just my opinion, though.
tooki:
That’s why I suggested Arduino, since you can make lights blink and motors spin and stuff like that.
SiliconWizard:
I would suggest you exposed the kid to Rust. :-DD
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: tooki on November 26, 2022, 11:00:17 pm ---That’s why I suggested Arduino, since you can make lights blink and motors spin and stuff like that.
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And why I suggested CrowBot Bolt by elecrow in #41, and actually ordered one for myself.
I did a group buy with a friend: he got one for his twin boys (ten, IIRC), and me one for myself. :P I refuse to grow too old to play, even if society tries to make me be ashamed for it!
I have been thinking about such remote-controllable vehicles, but with (adding!) a circular optical sensor (either rotating, or an array) on the bottom. The idea is that before the kids can program, they can use a whiteboard on the ground, draw a maze (using dark lines as allowed paths), and compete in who solves each one first. If you use a dedicated whiteboard, you can even add belts and small linear rails on one axis, and a second axis and a servo for a whiteboard pen, for drawing them under computer control.
If it comes to anything, the next step would be a much smaller vehicle with just a ground-facing camera module at very low resolution. There are optical mouse sensors with perfect resolution for my needs, and I only need to scan the perimeter pixels (and let the mouse sensor do optical flow otherwise), but the ones I could find (other than in specific used optical mice models) are quite expensive. For example, for wheels, I'd use these tiny (8mm×6mm) stepper motors instead of DC gear motors. Say, matchbox-sized, or only slightly larger.
It wouldn't then be a big step to replace the remote controller joystick –– which in the Bolt case is open-source programmable and uses ESP32 –– with ones own maze-solving code.
Fun times ahead, even if it yields no useful results.
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