Over the past few years, there have been an influx in tutorials and services aimed at teaching kids how to write code.
Personally, I’m a big fan. I was 10 years old when I got started and much of the material that I read was a little too dense or I lacked the mathematical background to fully get all of the ideas.
Anyway, a new tutorial site aimed at kids was recently launched…
Ruby For Kids is exactly as you’d expect – teaching programming using the Ruby language in a series of articles and tutorials geared towards kids.
You can install the tutorial through a Ruby gem, follow the articles, the reference commands, and the screencasts to get started.
If they’re geeky enough, your kids will love it. Then again, who’s to say that you couldn’t use this for yourself :).
Brian Notess says
Definitely will be working on this with my two-day-old son.
Tom McFarlin says
Sometimes I just wanna have kids so I can make them do this stuff =P
Ben Miller says
That looks neat, I’ll have to check that out. I’ve admired Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, a free E-book that teaches simple programming and game design using Python. It reminds me of working through similar books using GW-BASIC when I was a kid. My son is 6. He’s not quite ready for programming yet, but I am working with him on his own blog about animals, currently his #1 interest.
Tom McFarlin says
I love that more of this stuff is coming out geared towards kids.
I don’t have any kids of my own – at least not right now – and who knows if they’ll ever be into this stuff, but if they show the slightest bit of interests there won’t be any shortage of ways to teach them programming.