Intro to programming for kids 9-10

In My Humble Opinion
1

The little raindrops love, love, LOVE video games. I struggle with not letting them play too much and balancing out other interests. But they are are both very bright (what?) and I would like to cultivate their love of games into something that might serve them later in life, like learning to program. Problem is I never programmed anything more advanced than simple basic programs way back in high school.

Any advice on a way / program / web page that would be a good introduction to programming for their age that teaches as well as entertains?

-rainy

2

You could try a program called Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/
It’s a graphical way of writing programs, designed for kids, but I"m not sure what age it really targets. I think a lot of it depends on your programming ability.

A few other products are coming to market now such as these guys https://www.play-i.com/

If you have a bit of programming skills yourself you might consider getting a Raspberry Pi. For about $100 you can have a lot of fun connecting the computing world with the real world (ie turning on and off lights).

From there you can get really cheap tablets and try to write android aps.

3

http://www.alice.org/index.php - very nice and geared toward that age.

4

There’s the code.org “teach kids to code” initiative too that Obama briefly pushed:
http://code.org/

5

Thanks for the great suggestions. I’ll try some of these out with the rain drops.

6

Hopscotch on the iPad provides a good intro to general coding structures without kids realizing it.

7

Thanks for the thread Rainy, my little guy will like this idea.

8

My daughter took a summer camp on creating video games. She is 10.
The program they used was kodu:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=10056

I don’t know how intuitive it is without a teacher.

9

I’ve been told that Alice is the best way to learn, but I found it confusing a bit convulated. Maybe it’s because I already know how to program (I teach college-level programming) that I fought it.

Let me add “Thanks!” for these links, because I’m always looking for similar introductory courses that we might use in a one-hour “introduction to programming” or with high-school students. Keep them coming!

10

A little dated, but I got my first experience creating events in video games modules. I made games in Klik & Play. Not sure what the current equivalent is. {Genre} Maker games like RPG Maker? They don’t teach you a language per se, but I am of the opinion that the most important step is learning the logic of programming, and then you can extrapolate to specific languages.

11

iD Software (makers of Doom, etc.) runs technology camps for kids from 7-18 (they have two different basic programs, one for 7-13 and the other from 14-18). I don’t know much about it, but they had a booth at our company a while back and it seemed pretty cool.

12

Robot Turtles looks kinda cool.