[Swansea Hackspace] Teaching Children to Code

[Alan Cox]

On Sat, 25 Jul 2015 09:40:33 +0000
Richard Morgan <richard.morgan at avocation.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi All,
> I have been looking at coding tools to help teach my 8yr old son how to
> code.

What does he want to create. What is going to make him sneak off all the
time to play with it a bit more ? When does he have time he will
want to be fiddling with this and what will be to hand when he does ? Does
he want to be sharing with friends, if so what are they doing and what is
"cool" in his circle.

Giving an Arduino to someone who wants to write web games isn't going to
work (and vice versa).

> For UK are there better resources that I can use to educate him? Ideally
> something that will align with School if possible - any ideas?

UK goverment has just blown a huge amount of money re-inventing the wheel
to produce a new different incompatible with everything in the real world
"BBC" computer project. However you can't yet buy one or get access to
the mbed based development environment for it, although that is supposed
to change.

On the bright side I don't think any choice you make now will matter in
five years time. Stuff in just about everything but the desktop space is
changing so fast.

Alan