Can kids under 10 be possibly taught coding, without even mentioning the word syntax to them ??
I highly recommend going to your local board game shop and looking for logic games, like tile placement games or long-term-planning games. There is one called “railroad ink” that essentially has you roll dice that show different bends/paths to draw, trying to connect locations via rail and roadway. It teaches the basic logical concepts that you’ll build off of to teach programming. After playing a few different games, you can use the concepts learned to describe the tools available to them to build a program. I know a few tile placement games are designed to literally teach the concept of script-building, UI design, and resource management as it relates to programming.
Edit: https://a.co/d/eht5t18
Scratch basically doing this
Just adding the link so it’s easier to look up: https://scratch.mit.edu/
Scratch is basically a visual programming language with drag & drop editor that runs in your browser. It teaches basic concepts that are useful to understand for future coders without actually writing code in text form.
It’s somewhat popular around here to see if kids are into coding. Always see it offered in voluntary summer courses.
Yeah I came here to say scratch.
I was 7 when I started and learned what “syntax” meant along the way. Teach examples and in-practice stuff. It’s all just learning how to do stuff and apply it for other projects, like a kid learning how to play a game or something.
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.
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.
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.
Some people I know we’re writing C++ code without AI when they were like 7 years old
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.
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.
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.
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.
It takes a certain mindset, but yes, definitely, at least for some of 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.
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.
