Ask HN: Do you try teaching your kids to code? If you have kids, do you try teaching them to code? If so, how? Do you roll your own stuff, go on YouTube, Codecademy, etc? Roblox? I've been collecting anecdotes from friends and family about this, I'm developing a product around this (I sell a code editor to schools and am seeing what we can offer parents during the summer) and would love to get some good ideas from people out there. |
You can put tools and information in front of kids but you can't control what they will develop deep interests in. I think parents should show their kids skills and how to use tools, whether that means programming or carpentry, but not hold their breath that kids will follow in their footsteps.
I also volunteered at the school to teach kids how to build their own robot from lego, servos, and microbits.
What I have found is that most younger kids are not as drawn to coding.
It is the hands on projects that keeps them interested.
For ScratchJr I did put out a 30 minute project based course on Udemy. It has a few students here and there. But what really works is when I sit down with a class and show them live how to build a project on Scratch Jr.
and from parents too. because we can sometimes say something that a child takes at face value, but in reality it turns out to be a false fact.
the child accessed search engines from a tablet and asked whether what they were telling him at school and at home was true.
why the grass is green, why the sky is blue, why rock is good music))) and why the teacher’s anger is directly proportional to the size of her salary)))))
this didn’t teach how to program, but it did teach you to teach yourself.
I think this can be applied to programming as well. if a person hears or reads the same facts from different sources, he will learn easier and faster.
a good way to force by giving an opportunity. As a result, the child learned to study. and at one time I learned this skill only at the Polytechnic
Coding is communication. It will look very different 20 years from now, but it will still be communication. What's important is writing good specs. They have to learn to communicate, how to sort blocks of stuff cleanly.
OO might not be around in 20 years, but the principles of encapsulation, inheritance, SOLID, etc will still be around. Evolutionary programming will probably be much bigger in 20 years, and it's hard to see how, but it'll probably involve knowing what goals to set and how to design systems.
But for kids? It means putting stuff in a box. It means automating the things you do every day or at least reducing the cost. They'll learn far more from Factorio or those tycoon games on Roblox than they would from a book.
With my daughter, we started with a turtle that was a custom cotrol in Clasic Visual Basic 6. Later some mixed graphical programs were I wrote most of the graphic code as a library, and she wrote small part to draw nice things.
Later some simple programs in VB6, later C, Python and other languages. She is currently programing mostly in C#.
(She also programed in redstone or whatever is call the script language in minecraft.)
My daughter is really into mit scratch - particularly the animation and fan fiction stuff which is really interesting as its really creative