[orangethirty]

I've been teaching my girls how to code for a while now (was even published in Hacker Monthly magazine for it). My experience has taught me that the only reason they will learn to code is:

    If they have something they want to build themselves.

I battled with this idea for a while. Why can't they just build a website and be done with it? Turns out, building websites is boring if you don't want a website.

I tried all sorts of languages and tools. What has worked for me has been using the Arduino platform to build animatronic projects for Halloween (a pumpkin that yelled and flash LEDs), and Minecraft. With Minecraft you can create your own textures and game objects by using Java. Its really fun, and they can see the connection between code and results very quickly. Try it out.