I tried to get all of my kids interested in programming. All three of them had their own computers growing up (they all grew up and moved out some time ago). They all did things we might call programming, mainly in the context of games (my son especially played a lot of Minecraft and ran his own server for a while). My oldest daughter learned advanced Excel to do her job better (and survive layoffs). But none of them caught the programming bug like I did (it happened to me at age 14). None of them went into programming or IT.

You can put tools and information in front of kids but you can't control what they will develop deep interests in. I think parents should show their kids skills and how to use tools, whether that means programming or carpentry, but not hold their breath that kids will follow in their footsteps.

I have taught my kids ages 5 and 10 some coding in ScratchJr/Scratch/MakeCode.

I also volunteered at the school to teach kids how to build their own robot from lego, servos, and microbits.

What I have found is that most younger kids are not as drawn to coding.

It is the hands on projects that keeps them interested.

For ScratchJr I did put out a 30 minute project based course on Udemy. It has a few students here and there. But what really works is when I sit down with a class and show them live how to build a project on Scratch Jr.

When my son was still very small, he was about 8 years old, I gave him this practice: everyone lies, when and who exactly is difficult to make out, so you need to check all the information, even from teachers at school.

and from parents too. because we can sometimes say something that a child takes at face value, but in reality it turns out to be a false fact.

the child accessed search engines from a tablet and asked whether what they were telling him at school and at home was true.

why the grass is green, why the sky is blue, why rock is good music))) and why the teacher’s anger is directly proportional to the size of her salary)))))

this didn’t teach how to program, but it did teach you to teach yourself.

I think this can be applied to programming as well. if a person hears or reads the same facts from different sources, he will learn easier and faster.

a good way to force by giving an opportunity. As a result, the child learned to study. and at one time I learned this skill only at the Polytechnic

Not directly.

Coding is communication. It will look very different 20 years from now, but it will still be communication. What's important is writing good specs. They have to learn to communicate, how to sort blocks of stuff cleanly.

OO might not be around in 20 years, but the principles of encapsulation, inheritance, SOLID, etc will still be around. Evolutionary programming will probably be much bigger in 20 years, and it's hard to see how, but it'll probably involve knowing what goals to set and how to design systems.

But for kids? It means putting stuff in a box. It means automating the things you do every day or at least reducing the cost. They'll learn far more from Factorio or those tycoon games on Roblox than they would from a book.

My recomendation is to start with a turtle, like in Logo. I think that Python has a similar module.

With my daughter, we started with a turtle that was a custom cotrol in Clasic Visual Basic 6. Later some mixed graphical programs were I wrote most of the graphic code as a library, and she wrote small part to draw nice things.

Later some simple programs in VB6, later C, Python and other languages. She is currently programing mostly in C#.

(She also programed in redstone or whatever is call the script language in minecraft.)

No. As someone who loved to code I am self taught. There are moments I believe my kids can barely read, copy/paste, or follow directions sufficient to work a toaster. Pushing them to write code feels like inventing a cure for world peace. I am just ready for them to get the hell out (they are both adults graduated from high school).

I recently discovered Swift Playgrounds and have been using them to teach my 7-year-old son to code. I think he enjoys it, and the instant feedback (moving Byte, the main character, through a maze) is both helpful and fun.

I dont teach them to code but have offered to teach them

My daughter is really into mit scratch - particularly the animation and fan fiction stuff which is really interesting as its really creative