Programming

20715 readers

217 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

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 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

179

Advice needed, son wants to learn how to program (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

75 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi all,

My 8 year old is asking if he can learn how to program.

I’d like to support this, and it seems like it’s not a transient interest as he’s been all over scratch, and using things like minecraft commands for the last year. I have an old (pre 2017) MacBook Air I can set up for this. How do I / what would you advise I set up for him, to a) keep him safe online (he’s 8!) and b) give him the tools he needs in a structured way.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In terms of keeping him safe online look into some content filtering for the whole home network, either paid or self-hosted.

Projects that act upon physical stuff are the most rewarding. Something simple such as building a simple Python script that interacts with a smart home API and turns switches on/off or changes light colors around the house are relatively simple and require no hardware/mechanics if you're not into robotics, soldering or circuit boards.

You've got a great kid :)

[–] MonkCanatella 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I love this. https://www.youtube.com/c/beneater ben eater does a lot of hardware stuff that may be of interest in this area.

I know that there's some pretty advanced lego stuff which is a great entry point as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Writing a program in assembly for 6502 processor might be a little bit too far from scratch for an 8 year old

[–] MonkCanatella 2 points 2 years ago

HAHA yes of course of course. But it's not out of the realm of possibility if they show an interest in it. Ben does some really simple projects that an 8 yr old could tackle to get some real fundamental understanding of what's going on under the hood.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.youtube.com/c/beneater

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.