Tell HN: Teaching my 10 yo Programming | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Teaching my 10 yo Programming

5 pointsjinen833 comments

I have been wanting to teach my daughter basics of programming since a long time. I did try scratch and it left me progress a bit but not anywhere close to my liking.

However this weekend I came across brilliant.org and it left me awestruck at the way they have tooled it. Just to give you an example:

1) they have a maze with a robot and a target and kids need to program with simple instructions like move fwd, turn right which kids can assemble and see if their program helps them reach the target.

2) To teach loops and conditions - they have added conditions like [off target, fwd is clear, etc] to tackle complex maize with obstacles...

Now this certainly worked for my kid as she got engrossed in solving the problems. But my highlight was when she assembled her program --> she ran through all the steps like an interpreter would and verify if this would do it right before shooting the "Run" [she did this as I had attached negative TV time with every miss and incentivised with TV time on everytime she gets it right]

I was self-motivated to play with the microcomputers in the house because they were the most fascinating thing. And also I think that my dad was a role model.

Maybe you can convince her mom to start programming. That would add another role model who was doing it.

I think that programming will be something that mainly AIs do in 8-10 years. It's certainly important for her to learn problem solving skills and understand technology but maybe not actually important to be a programmer.

But for it to stick or not be a waste of time, you may need to allow her to find her own way.

So maybe consider opening up that non-TV time to allow for her to choose her own constructive activity. You can require her to choose something that uses technology to do some type of problem solving or otherwise constrain it. But try to be open to her own exploration. If she is doing something just to satisfy your rules then she is likely to abandon it when you stop making her.

I think also that you are fighting the natural subconscious tendency of humans to copy what other people (especially role models) are doing, and programming is already relatively unpopular among women. Which makes it even less likely that she will stick with it without your pushing her.

And now in the next several years programming will also not be so popular among men, as new versions of GPT etc. come out year in and year out with better and faster reasoning, discouraging students from trying to compete with AI.

Yes - the goal is to give her exposure and teach her a way of thinking through a problem in an algorithmic manner. FWIW -> mom has been into programming a while ago before she picked up growth marketing.

Poor kid.

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