What Language for a kid

Hi All, My daughter has expressed an interest in learning to code. It's a non-specific, very general interest. She doesn't have a specific area of interest that she wants to learn (UI, game development, HPC, etc.), she just want to learn how to code. What do people think is the best language for

Re: What Language for a kid

Scratch is on lots of Raspberry distros. I think it's moved to internet based with the most recent version. Lego Mindstorms (also from MIT). I think Minecraft PI is involved in some learn to program things. Python is also good. There are things out there for teaching kids with Python. I took

Re: What Language for a kid

Python is the defacto intro language at colleges now. I'm not sure what step one is to learn python but step two is http://pythontutor.com Click 'python' on the first page and then on each of the sample apps press 'Forward' until completion. That is pretty much all of computer science 10[0-9].

Re: What Language for a kid

OK, three people in a matter of 10 minutes have suggested Kano to me. For the benefit of others, The Kano is a raspberry Pi that kids build themselves, and learn to code using examples from Minecraft and others. It's a really cool system: http://us.kano.me/ On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Kenny

Re: What Language for a kid

I was going to recommend scratch as well. I think it’s installed on some Pi distros so it should be easy to set up and use. -Mark > On Dec 23, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Star wrote: > > To go against the grain a little here, I'd probably recommend starting with > something a

Re: What Language for a kid

Probably not surprising anyone, I'm going to recommend Python. It lets you dip in to the structure of algorithms without having to first learn to manage your own variable allocations, type restrictions, etc. Those things can be added later when adding C or Java. Python is also available by

Re: What Language for a kid

She did do a little with the Hour of Code thing last year, and I had thought that her interest had dropped off after that. Come to find out, she is very much still interested, just discouraged by the lack of exposure in school. I have to say, I have never heard of Scratch. There are a lot of

Re: What Language for a kid

You can get the Kano OS separate from the RasPi bundle. If you already have a keyboard, mouse, HDMI TV (or HDMI to VGA + monitor) and an SD card, you have the pieces already. There are UK based PI magazines (MagPI is online I think) with Scratch and other programming tutorials aimed at kids &

Re: What Language for a kid

To go against the grain a little here, I'd probably recommend starting with something a little more touchy-feely, to see if the interest persists. Start with scratch, it's available for everything, except maybe my toaster, but it's a little old. If the building/seeing keeps the interest then move

Re: What Language for a kid

Also, did she do any hour of code stuff? That just happened recently, so perhaps that served as inspiration and could help guide the quest. Or maybe she just heard the rhetoric around it and thought it would be neat? On Dec 23, 2015 11:25 AM, "Kenny Lussier" wrote: > Hi All,

Re: What Language for a kid

Paul Beaudet writes: > One thing I really want to recommend against is scratch or mindstorm. I > think they are both really fun and all, but no one that solely uses > graphical code block type systems self identify as a programmer or has > confidence to tackle issues that

Re: What Language for a kid

Hey Kenny, One thing I really want to recommend against is scratch or mindstorm. I think they are both really fun and all, but no one that solely uses graphical code block type systems self identify as a programmer or has confidence to tackle issues that involve code. Honestly it defeats the

Re: What Language for a kid

I have to agree with David here, except mindstorms is pretty awful, unless the only concepts you're looking for are simple loops, do...while, and conditionals, all mostly independent. It used to be based b some MIT stuff and was scratch-like, but it's been LabVIEW since the NXT. The current