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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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The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an
open doorway with an open mind.
-- E. B. White
(Score: 5, Informative) by Lemming on Thursday December 03 2015, @12:58PM
I'm a coach at a local CoderDojo [coderdojo.com], where we teach kids (starting at age 7) to program. The first step is programming in Scratch [mit.edu], as mentioned in an earlier post. You can click "create" on that site and start right away. We never install Scratch locally, but on the site you have the option to create an account, or to export/import projects, so you can keep your progress. Later, the kids move to other areas of interest, like creating web pages (basic html, css and a bit of javascript, we use JS Bin [jsbin.com] as an editor), tablet apps (using App Inventor [mit.edu]), or hardware development using the Arduino [arduino.cc] platform.
For a physical gift, you can go for an Arduino starter kit. You can actually use Scratch to program the hardware. Although I would start with a few programming projects using just Scratch, without Arduino, to learn the basics.
The CoderDojo wiki [coderdojo.com] has plenty of information on all kinds of programming languages, hardware,... suitable for kids. It's a great website to start your journey.
Another fun way to learn programming is Lego Mindstorms [lego.com], which also has a visual programming environment where you connect blocks representing actions, a bit similar to Scratch.