Teaching my 10-year-old daughter to program

unsupervisedmethods.com

31 points·RobbieStats··8 comments

This is really cool. I tried introducing my 7 year old daughter to programming over the weekend and, while she was interested in being able to make things, I had a hard time keeping her attention (which is probably a reflection more on my lack of teaching ability). Maybe I'll give her a few more years and try again.

I have an old Thinkpad x61 lying around. What would be the best way to introduce a 7-year-old to programming? I plan to be heavily involved of course. Can anybody recommend Linux distro that is responsive and programming enviroment? From the looks of it, Scratch requires Flash...

> From the looks of it, Scratch requires Flash...

Snap may be a good flash-free alternative: http://snap.berkeley.edu

Thanks!

I highly recommend UberStudent.

It seems more aimed for high school and is last updated 2 years ago...

It'd be a hell of a high school student who competently used uberStudent. Most career programmers don't need the latest and greatest so I'm sure this will be fine.

Also it's fast on old machines, saving you money/recycling.

Your 7 year old ought to be able to throw it across the room when they get annoying bugs :-)

Come to think of it, this should be a feature of all laptops programmers use...

I've been teaching my 7 year old using the "Coding Games in Scratch" book, and he loves it. I'm using Chrome on Ubuntu 16.04 to run flash, and it works fine.

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