Ask HN: How to teach a 4 year old to code?

5 pointsposted 5 months ago
by kamphey

Item id: 45058268

12 Comments

calgoo

5 months ago

My 5 year old is playing Minecraft and watching YouTube videos. He has now started asking about the automations, switches etc. so I'm teaching him the basics of coding, but in visual minecraft.when i asked about if and else the other day and referenced the switches he understood instantly what meant.

sargstuff

5 months ago

Perhaps something along lines of setting up / planning robot/activity path? aka (noted in other postings) scratch junior[0]; mblock botly dash[1]; code & go

?? program robot to fetch/push food items to bowl.

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[0] : https://www.scratchjr.org/

[1] : https://blockly.games/puzzle

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7

5 months ago

This article covers some things, I guess

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11109739/

It highlights https://www.scratchjr.org/

kamphey

5 months ago

this part seemed interesting:

  "The experimental cohort outperforms the control group with statistical significance in comprehending potent ideational constructs encompassing representation, algorithms, and hardware/software interplay. Conversely, the control group performs better in grasping the debugging concept than their experimental counterparts. "
But when I read further it's that the assessment had to do with a seesaw, which the control group had a literal seesaw they can use before and understand. While the experimental group was learning more abstract debugging.

So from this I think I'll use more in-person items and building literal things that have a problem, to teach debugging. Perhaps some kind of marble run. And discuss with him what he thinks will happen (the expectation) and the difference between that and what actually happens.

bediger4000

5 months ago

There's a few episodes of the PBS show Cyber Chase you might want to watch with your kid.

There's a toy called Turing Tumble that might be good too.

davidajackson

5 months ago

Make it a game like the carol the robot class at stanford.

hulitu

5 months ago

> Ask HN: How to teach a 4 year old to code?

Lock him in a room. Put him in front of a Windows 11 computer. A frien told me that it's "accessible". /s