[makuchaku]

I personally taught my 8yr son programming using Swift playground on an iPad. Its a great visual app which asks kids to solve fun challenges and minimal coding - but teaches them basics of variables, if/else, loops pretty well. Its a great starting point.

He also experimented alot with scratch.

Now he's 9 and learning intermediate Python through community classes taught by our area hi-schoolers.

He recently made a summer holiday project called "Story Machine" which takes 5 nouns, calls a generative AI API to create a story, uses Spacy to find nouns and randomly replaces those nouns with another set of random nouns - creating a funny story in the process. UI input using tkinter :-)

I helped him to learn concepts like API calls, JSON, generative AI, UI, event based coding etc - he google searched himself to figure out how to use those concepts.

Once you teach them the basics, they will fly!