New ways to teach young children to code

wsj.com

12 points·sonabinu··8 comments

My son's been doing Robot Turtles for awhile now and mostly gets it. The next step is to get him to do multiple cards at once rather than one card at a time.

I've heard about Scratch many times, but have never looked into it in detail. Anyone have experience with it for their kids?

My dad taught me GW-BASIC when I was young. One thing that's different now: when I wrote a GW-BASIC program that just printed text, or maybe outputted some CP437 characters, or drew some lines in 4 color mode, it didn't look all that different to "real" programs we ran on an IBM XT. But if my son gets older and I teach him Python or whatever, sure we can write a console app that does something, but it's not going to look anything like most of what he sees a computer doing.

(Though that said, he does like watching me play Brogue, so if we had an @ that moved around the screen getting in fights with r's and j's and B's, then that would be familiar to him after all.)

I'd rather teach them to play with blocks. They can learn to code later.

Give them a paywall to hack past?

Click on "web" below the title of this post and it will get you a link via google that will bypass it.

Interesting, I know about the click on 'web' link to bypass paywall. I did that as I usually do but this time clicking though the google results still put me on a paywall.

I wonder if WSJ has changed their policy on visitors from google.

Worked with private browsing mode for me.

Why does this needs to go into HN when you need subscription to access it.

Interesting it was not a subscription article when I first read it

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