Ask HN: Where to start introducing young children to programming?
6 comments
There's a nice list here: https://github.com/HollyAdele/awesome-programming-for-kids
Take a look at Raspberry Pi. I think Scratch2 is a really good way to learn programming and how it relates to hardware at the same time.
Do you have any great tutorials/websites that could be suitable for kids?
They actually publish books (also mainly available in download, but of course printed is better!). Most of them are free to download. Scratch2 is a real programming language, but geared towards visually teaching kids (probably adults, too) how programming and programming languages work.
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
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
Checkout https://scratch.mit.edu/
How to Design Programs and Realm of Racket are great.
Both of which have started programming lego bots recently.
Just curious how I could best help them become better programmers.