Teaching kids to code

[Bhan]

I work in a public library, we are interested in engaging the kids who come in after school (10-12 years of age roughly). The idea was brought up to teach them how to code in a way that catches their attention and makes them want to come back. 

 

So far I've come across code combat and am interested in the communities thoughts on the program or any other program to the same affect. 

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated and I hope to update this thread with the results of the program. 

 

Thanks for your help. 

[0ri0n]

Teach them Java, it's a great first programming language. If the students are interested in programming they'll come back.

[FilipSebik]

57 minutes ago, 0ri0n said:

Teach them Java, it's a great first programming language. If the students are interested in programming they'll come back.

What about C# ? Simmiliar to java and is easier i think

[0ri0n]

It would be cool also Python to control the GPIO on a Raspberry Pi. When they learn the foundation you could do some cool projects like turn on and off a led light.

[Oshino Shinobu]

10 minutes ago, FilipSebik said:

What about C# ? Simmiliar to java and is easier i think

I'd say C (and pretty much all the C variations) are good to learn, but maybe not as a complete starter. I'd agree with @0ri0n that starting with Java is a good choice. It provides a very good base for moving onto C programming if they become more interested. Plus the fact that Java is used by pretty much everything.

 

Python is also a good one to start off with. 

[vorticalbox]

this implying that kids are going to want to sit and write lines of code over using a gui took like scratch.

 

scratch is super fast to learn and give instant results south he need ti learn the basics of a programming language but still allows for logic thought used to code.

[Mr.Meerkat]

2 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

this implying that kids are going to want to sit and write lines of code over using a gui took like scratch.

 

scratch is super fast to learn and give instant results south he need ti learn the basics of a programming language but still allows for logic thought used to code.

And to go ontop of that, there's a thing called livecode which is like scatch but no blocks...it's literally just english words for everything...

[Hazy125]

If something similar to code combat is what you're after, you might be hard pressed to find anything that's more user friendly. A lot of other alternatives are more basic in what the 'game' is and are a lot more IDE centric. codingame.com is alright in that there is a very large selection on languages to choose from if the usual HTML5/JS/CSS or occasionally python aren't doing it for you, of course this means there are some issues as there isn't a full compiler working in the background for things like swift for example, so if you try to do some insanely complicated and completely unexpected code, it won't like it. 

 

If the goal is to just teach code in an interesting way then you have to use graphics and sounds and all of that good stuff. I would suggest setting everyone up with a python web server or even just apache with a mod_python and have them make entirely python generated web pages. Or something similar. Please don't go visual basic, that's been done to death in a teaching environment