Ask HN: Where to start introducing young children to programming? Have a friend who has two kids, an 8 year old boy and an 11 year old girl. Both of which have started programming lego bots recently. Just curious how I could best help them become better programmers. |
Raspberry Pi was developed specifically to teach children computing. Scratch2 is a graphical programming language that comes with the default OS. There's also a special version of Minecraft that is basically meant to be hacked.
Personally I think every kid should have one, replaced freely (with limits) as necessary, automatically as part of the Education portion of your property taxes.
There are so many cool things you can connect to it (sensors, audio amplifiers, several types of cameras, robot kits, monitors, etc) and it rarely gets expensive. It definitely doesn't get boring.
The newest Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 4G of RAM (you can get 8 as well) is pretty close to what you want a desktop to be. Dual HDMI monitor outputs, too.
I sound like a salesman. I'm not. I just really like them and have a bunch of different models. The Pi 4 is so fast it really surprised me for the price. It's how I'd teach anybody to program.
As for Lego, here's how Raspberry Pi plays well with them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4l6N_6PEbU
You can buy it inside a keyboard now. I'd really recommend that. Take a look: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400