Kids learning to code is a huge topic these days. Here in Australia we mostly talk about whether kids should learn to code in school, but that’s not the only way to learn.
Developers who have kids: have you taught your kids to code? Do they have a Kano, have they tried Code Combat, are they curious about your work?
don’t have kids yet, but i will defiantly encourage them to learn code when they are old enough, very important these days and opens a lot of opportunities.
Yeah, same here — no kids, but I’d expect to teach them to code fairly early on.
My son is all grown up and is far better at graphic design than I will ever be. He is also quite good at coding and is currently looking at Code Combat.
I can’t account for any offspring, much less any I could teach code to. If an opportunity were to present itself, I can’t think I wouldn’t want to do something like this though.
Love the title - I tried to code my kids with a do while loop when tidying their room but clearly the code that I’d input in them had a bug in it…
When I first started looking at C++ back in 1990 my first son naturally took an interest… Needless to say he sucked it up like a sponge and was soon asking me questions I simply didn’t have the answers for - he was 7… By the time he was 9 he’d left me standing… He now has is own dev company…
I think the most important thing is to get kids to embrace fundementals and structure rather an just hacking and bashing away at code. There’s a myriad of stuff on the web and yet most of it is incomplete, inaccurate or, in cases, down right wrong… Learning things by playing games may on the face of it seem a cool thing to do an offer little resistance from the child perspective but imo its a mis-sell, similar to mixing honey with medication - its get the result but at what cost. Kids don’t become good musicians by playing musical games. Kids, people become good at something because they have the desire, it lights a spark, it floats their boat… My son was facinated with the fact that he could make things happen on a screen
My kids are still a bit too young to do any actual coding, but I’ve started them with puzzles that require you to think ahead as it will help them to think logically and of workflows as they grow older. Flow Free, which can be found on Android and iOS devices is great for this. As sometimes there are two ways to solve a puzzle, but occasionally there is only one, and you have to think about how the other colors might get solved as to not disrupt their path (and my daughter is doing a few of the more advanced ones that include bridges).
And don’t forget about Scratch, created by MIT for ages 8 and up.
There is also applications such as KTurtle, something I grew up on (it was called Logo when I used it). Where you use simple commands to tell a turtle what to draw and then you can start to make things more complex by learning about functions and more.
http://screenshots.ubuntu.com/screenshots/k/kturtle/2194_large.png
I think soon, instead of introducing her to KTurtle right now, I’m going to introduce her to Move the Turtle and/or some of the other iPad apps
It’s funny. My oldest just took a basic computer class, and most of it was on html. He had a lot of fun with it, but he has no desire to do it on a regular basis.
My youngest used scratch in his middle school class, and had a LOT of fun with it, and is still doing it after his class finished for the year. I don’t think he’s going to go into the industry either, but it’s nice to see him enjoy stuff like that…
My son was never interested in computer programming in high school, took a college diploma in game development where he enjoyed the art side of it thoroughly but was not that keen on the coding.
Now that he has graduated and is working as an artist for Ubisoft, he spends his evenings teaching himself C++ of his own accord and is really lapping it up.
My daughter is in third year honours chemistry and has absolutely no interest in coding. Perhaps an introduction in grade school might have made a difference here, I don’t know.
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