Ask HN: Resources to teach programming to my 10yr old brother

8 points·Justen··6 comments

Over the past year I've seen a handful of what looked to be really great resources for teaching younger kids how to program, but I never took the time to save any of them away. But now, I recently asked my little brother if he would want to learn, and he seemed genuinely interested. Would HN help me out in aggregating resources I can use to teach him?

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Here are some links I've been collecting for when my daughter is old enough:

http://www.in-the-attic.co.uk/2012/10/04/teaching-my-5-year-...

The Scratch programming environment for kids: http://scratch.mit.edu/

http://hackaday.com/2012/10/31/olpc-tablet-distribution-prov...

If you're in the UK: http://www.codeclub.org.uk/

If you want to walk through the lessons with him, you can check out:

http://learningcorona.com/

http://www.coronalabs.com/products/corona-sdk/

Lua is a simple language and might be good for picking up basic concepts. Corona has an unlimited free trial, and you can build simple games with very little code. The result will run in the Corona simulator (which will look like an Android or iPhone).

Alice is reasonably cool.

www.alice.org

Touchdevelop in the browser is a more recent option:

https://www.touchdevelop.com/app/

http://www.briggs.net.nz/snake-wrangling-for-kids.html

Helped me learn python.

Khan Academy recently released a computer science section:

http://www.khanacademy.org/cs

Kids Ruby - haven't used it (yet) - http://kidsruby.com/

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