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My 9 year old girl has expressed an interest in learning to program. Of course I want something that will give her short term rewards, but still teach solid skills. I know this question gets asked from time to time on various forums but I wanted to get some opinions from the good people of SN.
Christmas is coming... she's (for now) a Windows user... is there something you'd recommend as a gift?
Thanks for your ideas.
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Introducing Programming to a Child
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(Score: 4, Informative) by engblom on Thursday December 03 2015, @12:50PM
Scratch will reward her immediately as she will be able to create something herself in just a few minutes. Check out at http://scratch.mit.edu [mit.edu] yourself and you will see what I mean.
Additionally you could consider something from http://www.makeblock.cc/ [makeblock.cc] as a Christmas gift. The MakeBlock robots you program using Scratch.
Another alternative is Snap! (http://snap.berkeley.edu). Snap! is a bit more like real programming languages, allowing you to create functions and having local variables inside of the functions. The user interface is about the same as for Scratch as it was initially a fork of Scratch. Snap! has since then been reimplemented and is not anymore a fork.