Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming

My daughter is following this book (Python for Kids) on her own now, and about a year ago we spent a while reading the Hello World book (http://www.manning.com/sande/) which is a very gentle intro to programming, Python and it was great. I liked Hello World a lot because it explained lots of terms in familiar language and the illustrations and characters were very funny.

She's 12 now so her expectations about games are more influenced by gaming consoles, so I think the next stop will be doing some simple stuff in the Blender Game Engine, which can be programmed in Python too, once she becomes more fluent on programming.

Both books use IDLE as the programming environment, which is fine, but expect to have minor issues along the way: you have to be aware of intentation rules (it's Python) and in one game the library name could not be found because the name started with a uppercase letter ("import Tkinter" in Ubuntu). In Ubuntu you may need to install some extra packages, etc.

I've read through the sample of this book and looked at the TOC and read Hello World from Manning, and honestly, as someone who has worked teaching programming to this age range, they kind of suck.

They don't teach kids how to think about programming. Their first instinct is to assault them with syntax and use words that aren't readily part of a kid's vocabulary (for example, introducing the concept of "types" and coercing (using that word) between them in like Chapter 3 is just a recipe for disaster) in an effort to give the kid results. "If they don't see results, they won't stick with it!" Bull crap. If you give them great results for the first hour, but then it becomes incredibly frustrating to proceed because they don't understand the fundamentals well enough to do anything useful, you're not doing anyone a favor.

I know Hello World was co-written with the author's son, and so obviously this isn't an across the board problem. But in my experience, if you don't teach how computers work (in general), how programs work (i.e., you type stuff, the computer does it, etc.), and how to develop logical thinking about problems and how to break them down, all you'll be teaching to do is ape the book until they want riff on it, at which point it just becomes an exercise in frustration.

There is always a learning curve, but I firmly believe that there is a very linear progression of thought that you can teach in that will make the learning curve much smoother for most of the kids trying to learn. I've been doing work on a book of my own very, very slowly, but I'm hoping to fix a lot of the pedagogical failures I see in these books.

Maybe it'll come out soon, but then again, the world ends tomorrow, so why bother? :)

If you teach Python to kids, they get a gift from Guido.

https://plus.google.com/photos/108306457281321389001/albums/...

I'd love to hear from anyone who has observed children learning from this book to hear how it went.

I came across Snake wrangling for kids a few months ago http://code.google.com/p/swfk/ I haven't given it a good run as my son is still 3yrs old

Somewhat off topic, but I've heard people here asking what the point of selling the Raspberry Pi to hackers first was. When I loaded mine up and looked through the recently-released Pi App Store, I noticed how many resources for learning Python existed already and were ported/developed for the Pi. Getting this kind of background in place before the full release to schools will be great (if it pans out).

It looks awesome but sadly i cannot use it with my childs due to the language, i would love to see a translation to spanish.

It would be cool to have that kind of resource so they can use it while i'm not at home, even tough the most fun is when we all are into it.

If anyone know of a cool book or resource on spanish for them to read on their own i would love if you could drop a line.

I got into programming in the 6th grade via "Interplay's Learn to Program: BASIC." It was a little corny (there's a host that cracks lame jokes), but it totally changed the way I thought about video games and programming. At any rate, I'd say that if you can find a "game"-like presentation for any programming language, that would be the way to go instead of a book.

Great to see tools coming that help beginners learn programming.

I just realized my earlier post http://code.google.com/p/swfk/ is by the same author