[quan]

During the holiday season in December, I got my 9yr old son into programming by making games with LLM. We made a few browser games, and by the end of it he could write the prompt himself, copy the code to the right places, understand what a function does and add objects to the game by modifying an array.

What I learned is llm gives you the activation energy, you just type a few sentences to get the momentum going. To get the reward feedback cycle going you’ll want to add graphics as early as possible.

The most difficult part is to be by his side and ready to jump in whenever a missing coma breaks the entire game. You’ll also need to keep scope under control, I’d alway steer him away from doing any complicated animation. There’re plenty of opportunity to teach but be realistic that it’s not real programming

Here’s an example that I put online so he can share with friends: https://mquan.github.io/k.ai/coin-collector/