<story><title>How My 10-Year-Old Learned JavaScript</title><url>https://hackernoon.com/how-my-10-year-old-learned-javascript-d8782b586db7#.gpjilzh62</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>uniclaude</author><text>This reads like the author really wants his kid to learn programming, and the article shows more interest from the parent than from the child.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s obviously anecdotical but I&amp;#x27;m very glad nobody steered me into programming. It was my private garden, and I enjoyed every single second of the freedom it gave me. Writing my Delphi programs was funnier to me than programming books.&lt;p&gt;I think my point here is that I&amp;#x27;m not sure it is in the best interest of children to push them into our passions. Then again I&amp;#x27;m not a parent, so my opinion doesn&amp;#x27;t hold much weight!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>neovive</author><text>Author here. Thanks for the feedback.&lt;p&gt;My son&amp;#x27;s experience has generally been self-driven via Scratch. I introduced him to Scratch at around age 7 through CoderDojo and he really enjoyed it (I&amp;#x27;m a big fan of Scratch for kids--it&amp;#x27;s the perfect balance of art, creativity and logic with programming concepts mixed in.&lt;p&gt;I introduced Python, then Javascript, after he asked me about what I do (I was excited that he actually asked, so I ordered the book). I&amp;#x27;m more of a web designer&amp;#x2F;developer, not a software engineer, so I showed him to the tools I know (trying to keep things at his level) and set him on his way. The thought of being able to write his own video game keeps him motivated. He plays with the examples on phaser.io&amp;#x2F;examples and sees it as something he might be able to do after working through the lessons.&lt;p&gt;My biggest concern is pushing him into something that he doesn&amp;#x27;t want for himself. It should never feel like work. He likes the CodeSchool videos, jingles and exercises, so he does it. He got tired of the books, so he stopped. There are many long gaps, diversions and pivots, which is totally fine. If he just wants to play outside, build with Legos, read, watch a movie or do nothing, I don&amp;#x27;t bother him. Programming is not his job, it&amp;#x27;s just a skill that I think will be useful for him and is something I can actually help him with.&lt;p&gt;Side Note: I originally had a section in the post about how in the past it was more common to pass knowledge and skills down to your children in the form of trades (farming, sewing, blacksmithing, etc.) and is &amp;quot;computer programming&amp;quot; something worthy of passing down. I thought it digressed a bit too much, so I removed it.</text></comment>
<story><title>How My 10-Year-Old Learned JavaScript</title><url>https://hackernoon.com/how-my-10-year-old-learned-javascript-d8782b586db7#.gpjilzh62</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>uniclaude</author><text>This reads like the author really wants his kid to learn programming, and the article shows more interest from the parent than from the child.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s obviously anecdotical but I&amp;#x27;m very glad nobody steered me into programming. It was my private garden, and I enjoyed every single second of the freedom it gave me. Writing my Delphi programs was funnier to me than programming books.&lt;p&gt;I think my point here is that I&amp;#x27;m not sure it is in the best interest of children to push them into our passions. Then again I&amp;#x27;m not a parent, so my opinion doesn&amp;#x27;t hold much weight!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strictnein</author><text> &amp;gt; &amp;quot;That&amp;#x27;s obviously anecdotical but I&amp;#x27;m very glad nobody steered me into programming.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Same. When I was growing up, we had a Commodore 64 and a small collection of programming books. (For the youngens in the crowd: Back in the day, software would sometimes be distributed in print form and you had to type it all in). As I learned to read, I also learned to type code (starting around age 5 or so). Likely one of the first chapter books I really spent time with was the C64 manual: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.commodore.ca&amp;#x2F;commodore-manuals&amp;#x2F;commodore-64-users-guide&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.commodore.ca&amp;#x2F;commodore-manuals&amp;#x2F;commodore-64-users...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I also didn&amp;#x27;t know how to fix errors, so any time I made a mistake I would have to retype it all. By default, on a C64 you can just start typing a Basic program and then type RUN to run it. So you&amp;#x27;d enter something like:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   10 POKE 53280,2
   20 POKE 53281,5
   30 PRINT &amp;quot;CHRISTMAS!&amp;quot;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Then type RUN and it would run the commands. In the case of the above code, it would set the border of the screen to red, the background to green, and print CHRISTMAS! on the screen.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;I think my point here is that I&amp;#x27;m not sure it is in the best interest of children to push them into our passions. Then again I&amp;#x27;m not a parent, so my opinion doesn&amp;#x27;t hold much weight!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I think this is correct. My son has spent a fair amount of type with the faux-programming stuff they have for kids these days (Tynker, code.org, etc) and has enjoyed it, but I&amp;#x27;ve been struggling to find a way to transition him to something more real without it feeling forced.</text></comment>