Software development for kids - where to start?
Discussion
Our eldest lad (nearly 11) is a keen gamer and has expressed an interest in learning coding, ultimately with a view to developing games. I work in IT but not in software development so am aware of common languages, technologies etc. but don't use them so not sure where to start. I imagine we'd want to start him with something fairly accessible to get his head around the basics and concepts. He has a Chromebook which I cobbled together from an old Thinkpad and ChromeOS Flex so ideally he'd use that but we can work around that if need be.
A quick Google suggests things like Scratch, Tynker, Blockly etc., anyone got experience of these themselves or with their kids?
A quick Google suggests things like Scratch, Tynker, Blockly etc., anyone got experience of these themselves or with their kids?
eps said:
Scratch is good - but at age 11 - they might start to run out of interest in that. It's quite powerful though and I haven't looked at it for a number of years now.
Python would be worth picking up - most secondary schools start with this.
Yeah Scratch is fairly basic TBF, and Python is great (and genuinely used in industry). Python would be worth picking up - most secondary schools start with this.
But the benefit of Scratch is that you can pick up the fundamentals without worrying about imports, env etc. It's just a tonne quicker to get started with. My kids don't have the longest attention spans so it really helped.
Scratch also integrates really easily with edu hardware like microbits, rPi and IIRC some lego. We had a Microbit which the kids liked a lot.
Totally agree Python is a great option though. I'll probably get my eldest going on that soon.
Edited by budgie smuggler on Tuesday 29th April 16:46
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