Comments on: Teaching My Son to Program, When I Don’t Know How

By: Manuel

Manuel — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:43:29 +0000

Hi Israel,

I’ll recomend Ruby and this book: Learn to Program http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Program-Pragmatic-Programmers-Chris/dp/0976694042/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227314313&sr=8-1
He will be programming in no time, my daugther did…
And Alice: http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=what_is_alice/what_is_alice
we have not try it yet but we will…

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:09:12 +0000

I appreciate your dilemma. No doubt, you will get varying opinions, any number which might - or might not - work for you.

In our family, we home-school our 2 kids, and I’m a computer professional dad. In our case, we found what I think to be a VERY good intro to programming, that will motivate kids to learn. (Will it work for a 10 year old? I don’t know.)

We have used a book to teach the programming language Python. The book takes you through how to program simple games in Python. The book is “Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner”, by Michael Dawson. It is about $20 on amazon.com. Python is nice because:

- It is easy to learn how to do simple things quickly.
- It runs equally well on Windows, Mac, or LINUX
- It has a thriving community at python.org
- You don’t have to buy any tools
- You actually LEARN how to program, instead of just how to use a tool

You might give it a try. I don’t have any financial interest in this. This isn’t the only way to learn programming.

By: Ricky

Ricky — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:21:53 +0000

I would start Blake on ACSLogo… ;-)

http://www.alancsmith.co.uk/logo/

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:19:22 +0000

I agree with Arturo… Try some web application programming, using your Mac’s built in web server to display the results. In fact, if Blake has his own computer, you can set your Mac as a server internally at your house, and he can access his programs from elsewhere in the house, which he might get a kick out of. Then, if you are OK with it, he could even have some real online space to experiment.

He also might not really know what he want to do yet, so a primer on HTML might be useful also… Then he can build web applications that do interesting things, all viewable using his browser, an interface which is probably very familiar to him. You could also go into using mySQL for him to build a database for his toys or friends or something, and learn to write the applications to access and edit the DB, then display certain results in a page.

Hope this is helpful :)

-Brian

By: David Bennett

David Bennett — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:45:13 +0000

I find the greatest problem is lack of metacognition. My brain is screaming at me to take a step back and fit the bits into a greater picture. I can do monkey-see-monkey-do for bits of changes to something, but I lack knowledge of the whole.

And reading books is hilarious. ‘X’ number of pages of ‘what it is all about’ at a seemingly simple level, and then bang!, lost in deep space.

You have my sympathy, and I have my sympathy.

Onwards and upwards.

By: Arturo

Arturo — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:58:09 +0000

Awesome effort on your part.

OSX also has a few scripting languages bundled in that might make learning the fundamentals of programming easier to teach. Not having to deal with a complex interface and compilation issues etc.

Try Ruby, Perl, or even just Bash shell script. A simple text editor and the terminal window is all you need.

Once he learns the basics, then he can
move on to Obj-C

–
sent from my iPhone (@ihop) lol