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Comment by pkdpic | Hacker News Reader

Oh that's such a good point about the typing speed limitation I never would have thought of that for some reason.

I've been doing super light python lessons with my 3yo and I was wondering why we were moving slower than he seemed capable of in terms of understanding what I was saying but you just made me realize how long it was taking him just to type brackets and quotation marks etc.

I like this project and am looking forward to trying it. I'm starting to adopt a "the more the merrier" mentality with kids programming. Might as well expose them to the dynamic of having a bunch of different languages / workflows to choose from.

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You are teaching Python to your 3yo son?? I mean, maybe he is a genius but I do really wonder what a 3yo can possibly understand about programming (and you even make him type!)

lol, yeah it's so unclear what they really *understand* at that age other than what color hotwheels car they get if they can write a for loop.

3 y/o can form simple sentences like "dad is playing"

why they can't understand "x = 3"?

Because one is rooted in sensorial life and the other is purely abstract?

the grammar on a language isn't abstract too?

anyway, heheh, Scratch aims to teach basics concepts of programming to children older than 6 y/o; who knows if Python is easier?

edit: typo... coding =/ programming

I know who dad is. Who is x?

it doesn't seem like much more of an abstraction than an abstract numeric symbol equalling a certain number of physical objects (ie 3 = * * * )

in my limited experience basic variable use isn't much of a stretch for a 3yo

I mean, at that age, they haven't even really learned basic algebra; they still have to learn things like the order of operations, manual addition and subtraction, and manual multiplication and division.

Don't you remember reading books as a kid with child characters saying things like "I was pretty good at math class until they started introducing letters to the problems; I don't understand it at all anymore!" Things like that show that variables aren't directly intuitive to all children.

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