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Introducing Programming to a Child

posted by martyb on Thursday December 03 2015, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the making-introductions dept.

Justin Case writes:

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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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 03 2015, @01:10PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday December 03 2015, @01:10PM (#271323)

    Seconding Scratch as the teaching software of choice - and it's free.

    If you're looking for something tangible, you could set her up with a (pre-configured) Raspberry Pi, in a case. The default Raspbian includes Scratch in a non-web dependent format. I'd stay away from the Pi Zero this Christmas and go with a Pi 2 - it's still a little slow compared to something like an Intel Core based NUC, but at $100+monitor configured, it's also quite a bit less investment.

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