Coding for kids - the ultimate guide for parents

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[–]SoCo 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Really nice list.

When I was very young, I learned with Apple ][ BASIC and then later Windows QBasic. I had a lot of drive to learn this and spent many hours learning it myself, mostly with trial and error. At the time, there wasn't the plethora of options, resources, help, documentation, and examples there are today.

While I like the Scratch-style drag-n-drop coding innovation for learning, I do wish a similar, but easier, platform was there to take QBasic's place. Something like BASIC, JavaScript, or Python, but wrapped in a mostly hidden library and integrated IDE to hide the complexities....to provide easy basic graphical programming. I've experimented with a few attempts, but haven't found the perfect one yet. Stuff like SDLBasic, Qb64 and various python platforms.

There's something important in the initial learning, with having the immediate results from your efforts that making some gui in QBasic did. It's been awhile, but something dead simple could produce some fun stuff:

This one is chill:

These two, flashing colors, seizure risk: