A bit off-topic here, but still related I guess. I have a 1 year old daughter and I keep wondering what would be the right time to introduce her to computers and programming in the future?
I have always thought that she should spend time reading books, playing in the backyard and lego before she delves into computers.
Have any other programmer parents thought about this as well? Or any other experiences on how they introduced programming to their kids?
A class provides better structure with an end goal in mind. We enrolled him in several "make a game" camps that I think he enjoyed more than open-ended exploration.
These days, he takes CS courses in high school and enjoys them, I think getting them into programming at a young age is fine but not a necessary condition if you would like them to have it as a skill later in life.
As a parent, I'd say to introduce them to many different sorts of experiences and indulge them if they show interest, and be willing to let them change their mind. Be interested in what they do.
From my experiences in university so far (Comp Sci), this experience seems to be pretty rare. If I ever have kids, I hope to be able to guide them in a similar way I learned as a kid. If they want to mod Minecraft, sure, let's start with that and not a boring tutorial for TodoApp#5034.
It's a bit less polished, but far, far better when it comes to hacking. I found it significantly easier to create a mod for Minetest than to use a mod in Minecraft. Once my kids grasped the idea that they could add whatever items and behavior they could dream up, they really took a shine to it. The Lua coding used is very approachable.
The only issue though, is that I think a lot of his motivation stems from potentially sharing what he has made - pretty much everyone his age has a copy of Minecraft.
One advantage that may help is not needing a license; if you have siblings that have to share a Minecraft account they can play Minetest on as many machines as they have without bugging their parents to pay for a new account. Plus it can run on much older machines.
But yeah, it can be a tough sell just because people don't want to bother.
My youngest daughter prefers to rip the keys off my laptop, so she gets to do less typing....
Simple things, but things like make a switch that turns on and off a lamp or opens a door. Or simply building larger things out of smaller things.
I mean programming is really a matter of logic and composition. Something like "This switch will turn off all of the lights, but these switches will turn on and off individual lights." is a sort of "If (mainswitch is on) then {lights settings is the same as its switch} else {light is off}"
Apart from some pretty simple logic, it's really just composition. A turing machine is comprised of some really simple functions, and apart from that it's just a matter of understanding how to compose those into more complex ones, and understanding programming is just recognizing the processes of breaking down those complex compositions into simpler ones.