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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: 2) by tempest on Thursday December 03 2015, @02:07PM

    by tempest (3050) on Thursday December 03 2015, @02:07PM (#271340)

    For kids (and anyone really) I think the biggest disappointment is being limited to throwing out a bunch of text, which seems relatively boring in the GUI world we live in. When you say "programming" what does she mean by that? On a tech site we think of programming as actual code, but one thing I'd consider is HTML. This is not programming per say, but is quite accessible for normal people who take the time to learn, and produces real world results easily. If she has geeky tendencies to write true code, I'd certainly encourage that, but if she's not hardcore dedicated, making web pages might still be of interest to her.

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  • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday December 03 2015, @02:27PM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Thursday December 03 2015, @02:27PM (#271347)

    Yeah, HTML might be worthwhile for this since to her, program probably equals web page.

    I remember my sister wanted to learn how to make a webpage, some 14 years ago or so. Being a 17 year old asshole, I tossed her an O'Reilly web dev book. Maybe one of the "... in a nutshell"s. Can't remember. Anyway, being an intelligent 14 year old who doesn't take shit from her brother, she sat down a read the goddamn book and figured it out on her own. I was pretty impressed.

    Years later, she's now an art person by trade, but still pretty technical. She runs linux on an old Thinkpad T60 I gave her with almost no help from dad or myself.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!