|
I tried a few times to start teaching my son coding, since he was 3 maybe - and at first the problem was with math, then with reading, and later on, once he could read and do math, it turned out that motivation is a big problem. Having such an easy access to games on his iPad and MacBook (even within the screen time limits), never made sense to him why he should need to code himself. It just looked boring. This year, however, when he was still 10, something changed, and he got pretty interested to go through the coding course in Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming). He has been doing math there for a couple of years, so it was a natural additional course. I was amazed at how well the coding course is built there, with good explanation videos and a sandbox coding editor, which prompts on errors in real-time and displays results immediately in adjacent window. His other interest came from Roblox, where he likes to play with friends, and that has a Roblox studio to build your own game. You can build your own world in this studio just like in Minecraft, but to add game logic to it, you need to add scripts. The problem there however is that it uses Lua for scripting language, which is not as easy for me to help him with, and the API to access different parts/objects of the game requires lots of Googling and understanding of the Roblox architecture. So far, I’ve been writing some short code for him (with lots of googling), and he was modifying it to fit his game needs. But hopefully he gets it eventually to it himself. |