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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, Informative) by tonyPick on Thursday December 03 2015, @01:13PM

    by tonyPick (1237) on Thursday December 03 2015, @01:13PM (#271324) Homepage Journal

    Possibly this is a little too advanced, but if you're looking for something more challenging than Scratch then one thing I've always felt might be a good fit for this would be the latest inform tools [inform7.com].

    Basically inform is the language behind interactive fiction games, but the inform7 set of tools are designed for "non-programmers" in a lot of ways; the documentation is excellent, the language reads like "plain" English, there are a lot of programming concepts introduced through the examples, the tools are very helpful and easy to use for non-programmers (with a complete set of cross platform tools), and the output is a set of "playable" story/games.

    Also there's some information about using the inform tools in teaching [inform7.com] on the latest website, and here's an introductory video [vimeo.com] that's worth a look.

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  • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday December 03 2015, @01:43PM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Thursday December 03 2015, @01:43PM (#271328) Homepage Journal
    I love it - thank you for reminding me about Inform. I think I'm going to want my kids to do this, down the road.
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