Comment by d3Xt3r
2 days ago
I would recommend installing Scratch[1] - it's a programming language designed for kids from 8yrs old onwards. I would recommend pairing it with a Raspberry Pi, as you can do fun real-world physical stuff with using Scratch, and I think kids can find that very interesting. Eg, start with a simple program to turn LED lights on and off, programming buttons, playing sounds etc. Eventually this could lead to making simple games or other programs. Regardless, would highly recommend getting a Raspberry Pi as its just so much fun using it to interact with the physical world and getting to learn actual electronics.
As a parent with two kids that used Scratch during 2020 or so… be cautious. The web community was an unregulated social network with follows, likes, comments, and a wide age range (apparently) of people interacting. Around that time, there was a lot of inappropriate content, some bullying, sketches about self-harm, sex, etc. Perhaps they’ve fixed the issue. If not, I would try to install it locally and keep them away from the official website.
Incidentally, I later came to believe that the visual coding impeded their ability to learn text-based coding. That was just my experience and I don’t have formal research to back it up, but I still wonder about it.
> visual coding impeded their ability to learn text-based coding
As a former child, my opinion is the opposite. I learned visual programming with Lego Mindstorms NXT in ~2008, and later developed an interest in text programming on Roblox in ~2012. It's my belief that my fluency with concepts like control flow and values output from one part of the program serving as inputs for another part of the program were largely transferable to text-based programming. Learning a first programming language is 30% learning syntax, and 70% learning programming.
There's Hedy if you want to try a text based programming language for kids: https://www.hedy.org/
seconded, Scratch is a wonderful learning environment. I would pair it with ChatGPT and supervision, LLMs will really help flesh out ideas and figure out how to implement them for kids who won't know how to start, and since you can't just copy-paste into Scratch, the kid will have to actually do the work of dragging the blocks around. We did some amazing stuff with Scratch - visualizing algebra and trig functions by drawing them as a graphing calculator would, we even made a binary tree based morse code decoder, a rocket simulator (using real-ish rocket equation physics, air resistance, etc). Now we have mostly moved onto Desmos (graphing calculator) and Python.
I don't want to police someone else's parenting, but even with supervision I would be deeply cautious against exposing kids to LLMs from a developmental standpoint. Even adults have a hard time not anthropomorphizing LLMs, a kid under a certain again would essentially be unable to not view an LLM as a person, which could have some SERIOUS ramifications down the line.