Re:Ask HN: What gift to teach a 7 year-old programming?
by bluesmoon on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @03:36PM
(#1984516)
At that age, he can teach himself just like you did (same with me). I was 9 when I learnt BASIC out of the ZX Spectrum+ user manual. It all started when I typed in the first example program in the book and realised that I could change the example text to my name. Ego programming does wonders to boost interest.
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Re:Ask HN: What gift to teach a 7 year-old programming?
by lylejohnson on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @05:17PM
(#1984876)
Yes, but...
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.