Ask HN: Resources for a 10 Year Old? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Resources for a 10 Year Old?

8 pointsmaineiac10 comments

I've been fortunate this past year and through the pandemic - my friend not so much. His daughter is turning 10 next week, and she's a total "whiz kid" (is that still a term?). I bought her a macbook air (a good one!) because I am excited to see what she can do with it. She loves Minecraft and is already playing some of the more complex mods (AE2, IC2, etc). Looking for advice on where to steer her next! Obviously, being only 10 - whatever she's learning will have to have a fair bit of entertainment focus. I haven't spent much time around kids in general, so I'm hoping some parents/aunts/uncles can chime in here! Thank you!

PS: Explored a few older threads, but times change quickly!

View on HN

Multi-Media suites like Adobes are good for kids, it require someone to help get them up and running with simple concepts and show them what's possible, work through a project or two. Once they got the hang of it they love to play around and show off their work. Then when they become a teenager it's more self directed and you can point them towards resources for tutorials, portfolios.

Thanks for chiming in! As a UX/UI guy, this makes a ton of sense!

Pico-8. I recently discovered fantasy consoles and have been blown away by what people are making with them. If she is interested in making games but Scratch is too easy and boring, but full on game engines are too complicated then Pico-8 is perfect.

Based on Lua, with built in sprite and music editors makes things super easy and the community is awesome.

https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

(I have no affiliation)

Poh-Shen Lo's daily challenge website. Buy a module https://daily.poshenloh.com/ and do it yourself too, its competitive math for kids her age. He's the current US Olympiad coach

If she likes these, she should check out Art of Problem Solving's books.

Thank you!

Hopefully mom and dad provide supervision as a computer with unsupervised internet access can be a terrible thing for young kids.

At 10 IMO kids still need lots of...real world play. Legos, snap circuits, science kits / experiments that happen IRL...a bike, scooter maybe ;)

I'll be having a training session for them on computer safety and parenting - they do a GREAT job at keeping her active offline :) Thanks for chiming in!

Redstone logic, arduino starter kits, codehs, khan academy...

Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com