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by pkdpic 1050 days ago
I love these suggestions, especially the card game and making their own website.

I had my first real dev job when my son was born and I gave how to teach him code / reading / math a lot of thought. I tried speak and spells, workbooks, little toy pretend computers that had math games etc.

In the end just giving him a raspberry pi with ubuntu, a big kids keyboard and no mouse seems to have been all he ever needs / wants. It boots directly into the Unix shell, I aliased a little speak and spell script I tossed together and some shortcuts to music on youtube. And he doesn't even really need those.

He learned the basics much faster than I expected. Opening python for math, prepending "say" to words to have them read out loud (took some tooling in ubuntu...), control + C, control + W etc all seem to make general sense. And the slowness of the pi seems to help.

Anyway he started reading before turning three and seems to be doing well enough with math and basic variable assignment for whatever that's worth. Helping him make a website and getting him using git seems like a fun next step.

Now if only I could get him to care about anything more than his hotwheels collection...

3 comments

> Now if only I could get him to care about anything more than his hotwheels collection...

he's a kid, es supposed to care more about that than anything else.

Hey now if the kid hasn't elevated themselves through 3 FANNG roles by the age of 8 how could they ever make a meaningful impact on the world of ad-tech?
We all know the only way to get a job is to be able to put on your resume "started programming at 3".
Especially when unpaid internships require 10y experience.
“You doctor yet?”

“No dad I’m twelve.”

“Talk to me when you doctor.”

Hot Wheels has cars with NFC chips in them, and they're only about $5 a car. You could teach him how to make a stats tracker to compare his favorite cars, see which are the fastest, and which perform the best over time, with a cheap NFC reader you could place under tracks. You could even get some old-fashioned character LCD displays, make a little scoreboard and teach him how to print the winners on it.

If you're willing to learn to teach him something, it wouldn't even be that hard to get into hardware a little to make programmable tracks, and that'd be a relatively cheap hobby to share with him. Some cheap actuators from Digikey or Mouser and a $250 3D printer (which is an incredible tool to have if you're frequently around children anyway), and not only is he set with skills that'll make so much of his life easier, it'll probably be more interesting to him right now than making a card game.

Remember, hacker culture and everything that's downstream of it (like the free software movement) came about not because people were trying to prepare themselves for the workforce or from ambition, but because people wanted to make their toy trains run on time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club

If he likes toy cars, then please, please, please find the intersection of your love of computing and his love of cars. It's not a bad sign that he cares about Hot Wheels, that's actually amazing! There's a lot of cool ways to introduce technology to a love of cars, and the types of projects that exist in the intersection of programming and cars are incredibly useful for understanding computers on an intimate level. You can work on tracks and scoreboards like I mentioned, or you could take his Hot Wheels and help him turn his favorites into RC cars.

https://hackaday.com/2020/08/12/scratch-build-of-this-tiny-r...

https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/modding-a-hot-wheels-car-int...

If you want to go big, when he gets a bit bigger there are even more projects you could do. A simple ride-on kids' car (think a Power Wheels clone) is completely doable by someone of your vocation. If that seems like a bit too much for you, then you could always help him walk through a tutorial on how to make a self-driving RC car:

https://ori.codes/

I'm not hugely into cars; none of this is stuff that requires knowing about them to help your kid with. Please consider doing so; you seem like a really well-intentioned parent, and taking advantage of a kid's interests really helps when trying to teach them things. Thanks for caring about teaching him computing; genuine enthusiasm to share your love of something with a child can make a world of difference.

how is he doing right now?