Subtly Teaching Children To Program

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Over the weekend it was my birthday. Yay for surviving another year. Boo for a total lack of productivity as long weekend always produce.

It did give my brain a bit of a break from coding. That does not mean my brain stopped working. I added a couple of game idea to my list of ones I would like to make at some point.

My children are on their Easter break and all promptly came down ill. The oldest did show me what the scratch project he has been working on. We did a bit of pair programming to add a couple of features he wanted to add.

Until then I had not looked at scratch much - well at all if I am honest. My eldest two had shown a slight interest in programming (them being 6 and 8 years old) and I showed them a bit of java. Printing out times tables and so on and that amazed them that it could work them out so fast. They even tried making it do the 17 times table to see if it would struggle!

A little while later (about a month) we installed scratch on our computers and purchased a book about scratch. We just threw the book on the coffee table and left to discover scratch by themselves. Showing interest when they spoke about it but saying they knew more about scratch than us.

This is part of our child raising philosophy, give them the freedom to explore. I don't want to force them to learn to program if they are not interested. Once they show an interest we support them and help them out. If children are interested you don't need to push them to learn something.

They both consumed the book and while the younger one has not attempted to make a game he has spent a reasonable amount of time messing with it and having fun.

The oldest one had made a very simple game with flip screens and a zombie! While pair programming I was very careful to not take over the keyboard/mouse and got him to explain what he was doing, my children love teaching dad things so I get to act dumb quite a bit. Occasionally I made a suggestion when he hit a brick wall but never pushed it on him instead letting him make mistakes and learn from them.

It was fascinating watching his brain processing and gradually building understanding. What did rapidly become apparent was scratch was not going to fill his programming desire for very long.

He wants to create and importantly he wants to distribute. Scratch lets you upload to their site and we have not yet tried that out because he wants to finish his game first and give it a proper name. The question "can I put it on a tablet" was asked many times as, in that age/social group, they are the coolest things around at the moment.

As far as I can tell scratch does not let you export to either android or ios. I took a look around and found that is a bit of a gap. I know he is not ready to use eclipse :) Honestly I am not sure how he would take to Java even with a simplified IDE and even then it would still need a nice simple gaming API not LibGdx.

So what is the next step after scratch? Particularly one that leads to mobile development/deployment.

My currently plan is to introduce basic (please don't set me on fire) later in the year perhaps something like monkey. I have not taken an in-depth look yet but it does support getting on android and ios.

I probably have less than six months to decide before I have to subtly leave another book lying around and see if they take to it.

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