[spricket]

I'll say this from my experience as a coding kid. If you find your kids have programming interest don't treat them like children when they come to you for help.

I taught myself several languages when I was ~11 but my parents always treated my interest as a curiosity. When I went to them for help they bought me kids books. This held me back because it never went beyond the basics and never explained the fundamentals I was missing like algebra and pointer math. Almost all the kids stuff is "cookbooks" that will give you a working program without explaining why. My biggest breakthrough was getting "the Perl Bible" and a bunch of orielly books on Java for Christmas.

The best kind of teaching is 1:1 tutoriing. Assuming you know programming since you asked this on HN, I think the best thing you could do is train your kids personally as if they were in a CS101 course.

I would teach them just like you would teach an adult. The only difference is they're going to be missing some math and data structure basics. Find their gaps and fill them in, and I think you'll be surprised what they're capable of

[harikb]

Thanks for your feedback.