THthrowaway71271·Jul 23, 2024
I think it depends a lot on the kid and the parent, I am teaching my daughter since she was 10, and I try to spend time every day doing something, you can see our progress here: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...
It is difficult because I have to compete with snapchat and google/meta for her attention, and school is quite exhausting. Snapchat has this super annoying 'streaks' and the more friends you have the more streaks you have to keep alive, so you have to send like 400 messages per day.. its non stop. I teach her that there are 100_000 developers and psychologists and product owners and etc, that they go to work every single day thinking how to extract the most value out of her attention, and she has to constantly be aware of what is the "algorithm" making her do.
Unix Pipes she got quite quickly, but doe
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sn't use often, but the idea of one program reading another program's output she got. Also grasping the command line was not that difficult. But I used quite some tricks to help. For example her windows PC I change the shell from explorer to cmd.exe, so it boots in cmd, so she has to navigate and also fix it. I also make scavenger hunts on her filesystem so she has to look for a file using dir and cd and etc, also https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ I bribed her with robux for passing each level of the bandit game
I want to teach her how computers work and how to make them do what she wants. From what is a register, to an instruction, to a program to a process. Kihon no Kihon as they say. But in the process I also teach her how to break things down and how to think and most importantly how to learn. I teach her about the heart of things, so there is no mystery between the keyboard press and the letter appearing on the screen, or how chatgpt predicts the next word (I am working on a RNN board game with 3 neurons and you have to teach it to count https://punkx.org/move-37/rnn.pdf [work in progress])
So in the end I am not sure if it matters what you teach your children :)