2 min read

Don't make your kids learn programming

Ok, I admit that’s click-baity.

What I meant is, don’t push your children to learn programming for your sake, by your way. Especially if you don’t know much or even anything about it.

I too know nothing about guiding or teaching kids. But there are two suggestions that I don’t think can’t be wrong:

  1. If you can, find out if they have interest in computer hardwares, ARM based SBCs are popular, very capable, and affordable, any of these will be suited for beginner hobbyist & prototyping: Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Adafruit. Open source hardwares are easy to find today, you have choices for other microprocessors too, like RISC-V, which is two most popular CPU used for running mobile & IoT devices. There’s a lot of ideas you can start with, introduce Linux, build robots, you’ll come up with more project ideas in no time. Hardware is tangible & IMHO still useful to know today (even for the far future, really) even if your kids ended up in software world because there’s too much abstracts in the computing world.

  2. The other one is to start from Scratch site, it’s a learning program for kids developed by MIT. They know a lot about computer science & teaching it.

My opinion on young kids learning about programming is that since they have much more time to learn the fundamentals, instead of rushing them to achieve certain level or produce anything, letting them focus more on exploring by playing should be much more beneficial; they’ll have more natural inclination to learn by themselves & be more creative.

A quick note on programming school for kids:

Learning with other kids in some programming school can be good, but I’m not sure how necessary nor how good it is. There’s always a risk (mostly hidden) element in any courses: shaping & pushing the students to be a certain type of worker instead giving the broadest & deepest foundation.