Can kids under 10 be possibly taught coding, without even mentioning the word syntax to them ??
It’s a kids book about a girl called Ruby who goes on adventures that slowly teach the basic concepts of programming to kids.
It’s also been translated to 22 languages and won a bunch of educational awards.
I learned coding at age 7-8 by messing around with the scripts of the built-in demo stacks in HyperCard. It was close enough to English that you didn’t need to study syntax but could easily learn from example
I’d recommend looking at Hedy, it was created to teach kids programming with a smooth ramp from simple English-like statements, all they way to full python, with formal syntax introduced very gradually. https://hedy.org/ As a bonus, it also allows non-English speakers to use keywords in their native language.
My dad got me started programming when I was 12. He gave me the “introduction to c# copyright 2002” (dm me for the isbn if you want, I’ll have to find it later). I might have done 10% of the book before I kind of got bored and started doing whatever the fuck I wanted. By age 16 I got my first job, and then in college I always had some sort of contract… nowadays I’m working full-time.
All I have is that anecdote to say no… I really hope other people have had better experiences than me.
But if my anecdote helps then you could have potentially three to four years of teaching them how to problem solve as a skill before you teach them how to program. I’m grateful for the problem-solving skills my dad gave me.
I’m also really grateful that my elementary School taught us how to type properly
It takes a certain mindset, but yes, definitely, at least for some of them.
Just demonstrate what a syntax error is.
“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” Vs “The fox, quick, brown, lazy dog is jumped over by.”
You are trying to say the same thing but the computer expects to be told a certain way, so it’s confused.
Kids certainly have the capacity.
Windows 3.1 had some BASIC games that you could run. A snake game and one where monkeys threw bananas at each other. It was a great “fuck around and find out” platform. I could write simple programs from scratch well before 10, learning entirely through experimentation.
Sure. Almost 40 years ago I started learning to program as a kid, and the only reason I knew the word “syntax” at all was because the default error message in my computer’s BASIC interpreter was “SYNTAX ERROR”. I didn’t learn what it actually meant until many years later, in English class.
I taught myself with the excellent Usborne books, which are now all downloadable for free from their website. You won’t be able to use them as-is (unless you get your kids to use an emulator for an old 8-bit home computer), but I’m sure you can still get some useful ideas, and maybe even copy small sections here and there.
As others have mentioned, my school also taught us a little LOGO, which was a bit of fun for me but rather simple. I remember that most of my classmates enjoyed it, though.
I’ve did some very light programming on our C64 at 7 or 8. A few years later it was .bat files to do system stuff. Not exactly C or anything but it was fun, gave me an understanding of programming and the computer. Didn’t end up going the developer road but do scripts in-house and for customers.
Depends what you consider the baseline to call something “coding”
Plenty of kids dabble with Redstone in Minecraft, there is also stuff like this:
I mean, I had an uncle showing me HTML at 7 (not a programming language, but still). I learned basic JS on Khan Academy at 11, and if I’d known it had existed earlier, I would have started earlier.
Some people I know we’re writing C++ code without AI when they were like 7 years old
As soon as they can read a little, they can program. Visual languages or text even. They need a very user friendly env but kids pick up QUICK
I was coding Lua at 13, when I learned I def felt like I could have learned earlier. I was surprised the basic concept was so easy.
They taught us computer programming concepts, in elementary school, in the 90s with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
We didn’t know it was programming, we thought we were instructing a turtle (with paint on his tail) how to draw pictures. But we were learning how to solve problems with functions, loops and select statements.
I didn’t realize it until I was in high school and learning C, I just remembered it as a really neat computer drawing class.
Scratch is probably an improvement, I haven’t looked at it too hard though.
Is this in anyway similar to Turtledraw? Looks like a similar concept (programming the maths to make a turtle draw graphics). I’ve seen a load of different implementations, from something similar to Logo (where it’s drawing on the screen), to where it’s drawing using a physical robot with a marker pen and a big sheet of paper on the floor, to a variation called Turtlestitch which controlled an embroidery machine.
I spoke to a woman at a conference last year who uses Turtlestitch to teach 7 year olds advanced programming paradigms.
They’re likely related in that they’re using a similar teaching method of having the student image that they’re the turtle and then reason how their instructions would affect the outcome. It’s easier for kids to learn that way than to try to explain the high level concepts, and later once they have the intuition of what a loop is, or a select statement, they can learn the more abstract terms.
Children learn FAST. If they are not blind memorizing then logic will just click.
They won’t become “employable professionals” at 10 but they will call pointers intuitive at 13.
