Comment by Waterluvian
6 days ago
8 year old badly wants to be an engineer like his dad. :’) Public school got him into Scratch so he was animating things. The high school robotics team I mentor has Lego robotics kits for their community outreach program. Those kits use Scratch. So I got him a used kit and he spends an absolutely ridiculous amount of time making robots that do stuff.
This started at a very young age: we gave him access to a windows PC, not a tablet. So by 3 he could log in and get to YouTube kids. This meant that keyboard and mouse and web browser were very comfortable concepts.
We also gave him and his younger brother countless building toys. Meccano. Lego Technic.
A few lessons I’d love to empart:
- you can’t make your kid into this. His younger brother has no interest and is far more about sports. So we nurture that with him instead.
- open ended learning. I’m not sitting down and teaching him. All I do is make sure he has access to the tools, and I unstick him when he’s stuck.
- I connect concepts when I see them. “That’s called a loop. It’s just like that thing you did in Minecraft to make your machine work over and over again.”
- the learning must all be a side effect of having fun. Don’t try to teach programming. Do fun things and fill in the programming toolbox, tool by tool, as they’re needed.
- connect programming to what your kid is passionate about. Programming is a means to an end, not the end itself. My kid loves trains and has a Lego train set. I suggested he use his technic to automate the track switch. I then let him work at it for hours and hours over weeks, giving him breadcrumbs of what to consider next.
When I was younger, the "logo" computer language was well-regarded for education of the young.
It is now a JavaScript platform:
https://turtlespaces.org/
Historical background may be helpful:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
Smalltalk, as the founding language for object-oriented programming, was originally targeted at children.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk
I don't think any operational versions still exist.
There is a turtle graphics framework in the Python standard library: https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html
Pharo is a cross-platform implementation of the classic Smalltalk-80 programming language and runtime system: https://pharo.org/
> - you can’t make your kid into this.
Thanks for saying this up front. Worth repeating.
May I ask which Lego robotics kit you refer to? My 5 year old is mad about Lego, and motors and electronics. I’d love to connect them all into one thing for him for his 6th birthday..
I got a used Spike kit. But the new ones are very expensive. The Mindstorms NXT are older but also use Scratch and are pretty decent hardware. I’d definitely approach this by looking for a used set unless you’ve got money for it. :)
Goboscript was on HN a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44026799
for when they grow up =)
This is great advice.