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

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: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @01:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @01:53PM (#271333)

    In relation to scratch, there's scratch for arduino (http://s4a.cat/)

    You do the programming with a normal PC and connect an arduino board, which then let's you control lights and motors and such and read inputs just by running the program on the PC. So in a way it's a physical I/O extension to scratch.

    You can also translate them into arduino sketches, so you can run the program standalone with the arduino board only.

    But i do have a question to those talking about RPi, can you control the I/O off RPi with scratch or are you just suggesting that, so the kid won't hog the PC?

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  • (Score: 2) by rob_on_earth on Thursday December 03 2015, @02:30PM

    by rob_on_earth (5485) on Thursday December 03 2015, @02:30PM (#271350) Homepage

    It was possible in older versions of Scratch on the Pi but was not straightforward, latest versions of Scratch do have full IO support.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @04:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @04:22PM (#271415)

      ok, good to know.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @07:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @07:24PM (#271511)

    Oh and there's actually another extension for scrath for arduino (http://khanning.github.io/scratch-arduino-extension/).

    Also, there's ardublock (http://blog.ardublock.com/), with which you can make compiled programs for arduino with a graphical language.