this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
184 points (98.4% liked)
Programming
17313 readers
157 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Everyone else's suggestions are great.
Get them a copy of Factorio, it's a game, but it's all about computer science fundamentals, architecture, pipelining, busing, data integrity, etc. It's a visual game, but it'll scratch the itch of programming. It'll get them to think.
Buy the hardware projects, the little ones with either a pic, an Arduino, something that does something physical. A little bit of programming. To make a thing happen. So they can experiment.
Look at the software robot competitions, there's a couple on steam, there's couple elsewhere, you can do it as a family project, whiteboard out the logic of what your robot will do, and you can write it together. And see how it acts.
Just make sure anything you get, has a very small feedback loop, so they can iterate very quickly. That'll keep them engaged and exploring. You don't want to get a daunting project that's going to take weeks to see any output. You want things on the order of minutes, or even seconds to see what happens
Ah, haven't thought about factorio. On that matter 7 Billion Humans is a cool game that can teach the basic logic behind programming.
Seconding all of the above. Also tis 100 and exabots. All games by that developer actually.
I love Zachtronics, but I think their games are very ambitious for 8 years old. Maybe teenager with some discreet logic skills under the belt.
You are absolutely right, I overlooked the age.
"send me your favorite base" is probably a better programming interview than most
Get a breadboard. Get a bunch of wire for it. And do small projects with the breadboard in a controller. It's fun to move the wires around. You can even build a tiny 8-bit computer with a breadboard. And have a do things like output of display. It's very tactile and hands-on. Excellent visual. There's excellent YouTube tutorials up there for breadboard projects.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS0N5baNlQWJCUrhCEo8WlA
This guy has some excellent breadboard projects. Find an easy one. And do it together with your child
Also, remember Human Resources Machine. Its a puzzle game thats actually a progamming language
If you get them factorio then they'll just play that all day instead of learning programming
factorio is programming