Comment by jerkstate
2 days ago
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.