Ask HN: What gift to teach a 7 year-old programming?
When I was a kid I learned programming (in BASIC) by copying programs out of Creative Computing, or their books with collections of programs, and running them on whatever computer I could get my hands on.
My nephew is 7, and sharp as a tack, and I'd like to get him something for Christmas that he could use to at least find out if programming is something he'd be into. I don't think he's too young to get it, but I'm not sure what toys/gifts might be appropriate. He lives too far away, unfortunately, for one-on-one lessons or anything like that. Any suggestions from the HN community on good "gateway" toys or gifts to look into?
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The author has done a fantastic job of capturing the feeling of the Basic Computer Games book where you can just type in the code and fun stuff happens. I've got my 7 year old daughter started on it and she's having a ball.
So does your daughter work out the programs in IDLE? That's very cool, and encouraging to hear. (This is one of the reasons why I wish we lived closer to my brother and his family, so that it's something the nephew and I could work on together).
When you turned on your ZX (if I recall correctly) it popped up in a BASIC interpreter. As did the Commodore PET, VIC-20, C64, TRS-80 CoCo, ... and you get the idea.
My nephew does not yet have his own computer, but if he did, it would boot up into Windows/Mac/Linux. So then I suppose the question is what sort of "encapsulated" (?) programming environment we could install for him to work with. Maybe Hackety Hack would be an appropriate choice in this circumstance.