Teaching Your Kids to Program
Why is that when you have great plans to do something, events overtake you? I was determined to teach my kids to code this summer. That has not happened. They’ve played a lot of Minecraft and they’ve done some movie making, but they have not programmed. Is this something that I just want them to do because it’s what I do?
In any case, I stumbled upon this link over the past few days an I think it has promise. Tynker, a Mountain View startup company, has devised something they’re calling “Adventures in Programming” that uses a plot-driven, gamified way to learn how to code—or so says the summary over at gigaom. In the article If School Won’t Teach Your Kid to Code, Maybe This Program Will, Ki Mae Heussner talks about the company and the program and this screen shot looks pretty sweet:
The cost is about $50 for the structured course, so I’m not sure that I will do it, but what I like about the gigaom article is that through the comments and the text you can find other, cheaper and even free options to try.
As a software engineer myself, I think I’m going to go back to trying Small Basic, but maybe I’ll find that using Minecraft’s plugins to do things might get my kids interested.
What have you done to get your kids interested in programming?
Generic Point used via Standard Restrictions at stock.xchng. Tyker Screen shot from gigaom article.
