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.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @01:53PM
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?
(Score: 2) by rob_on_earth on Thursday December 03 2015, @02:30PM
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
ok, good to know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @07:24PM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @07:03PM
Oh, and there's BlocklyDuino (https://github.com/BlocklyDuino/BlocklyDuino) (web interface here: http://blocklyduino.github.io/BlocklyDuino/blockly/apps/blocklyduino/). [github.io]