Re:Ask HN: Best way to introduce a young girl to computers?
by eccp on Saturday January 01, 2011 @03:12PM
(#2058278)
I second Scratch, it comes with a lot of examples which she can tweak, so she can explore changing settings. It's very intuitive, my daughter liked it a lot. It's available on Win, Mac and Linux too (on Ubuntu you need to install the squeak package first).
Re:Ask HN: Best way to introduce a young girl to computers?
by EdwardMSmith on Saturday January 01, 2011 @09:30PM
(#2059201)
My (now 8 yo, but 7 at the time) daughter found Scratch to be mildly interesting, but not really compelling. She'd use it every now and again. But, she's pretty addicted to Kodu. I think the 3d aspect of it, as well as a more narrow topic (game/world creation and interaction) made things a lot more understandable for her, and allowed her to focus. She's still learning the same concepts, I believe, in the end, and that's what I'm after. I think of it as really a 3d Logo.
She's into 3 and 4 page programs now, with multiple actors, and fairly deep storylines.
http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/
As well MIT scratch is a little more gender neutral:
http://scratch.mit.edu/
If you want to go less with the programming route and more of an artistic route, buying Photoshop or Pixelmator and working some tutorials will usually set the spark. I have found with my girls the art stuff took just a little spark and they ran with it. My 10 year old is now teaching my 3 year old design. The programming still takes active involvement on my part to help her through some of the tasks.