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How were you learning programming at the age of 5?

For Beginners

Started by Tutorial Doctor February 23, 2015 11:14 PM

33 comments, last by jeskeca 8 years, 12 months ago

Tutorial Doctor

2,574

Author

February 23, 2015 11:14 PM

I have heard a lot of stories that this programmer and that programmer started programming in fortran or some other language at the age of 5-7. How?

I told a three year old that I would teach her programming when she is 5. She says, "I am five." So I let her type her name on my laptop (Input and Output).

Were you hacking calculators at that age?

I am way behind myself. I started this venture 2 years ago.

There are even programmers that are teaching their children programming. How?

This is for my learning as well as my teaching.

They call me the Tutorial Doctor.

Brain

19,058

February 23, 2015 11:28 PM

I have an old 8 bit computer on my desk upstairs.

I bought it with the sole intention of teaching my 5 year old daughter simple programming concepts in BASIC.

As soon as she could spell simple words I had her trying out simple commands which provide immediate response, e.g.

"type COLOUR and then a number"

"wow look daddy I made everything go pink!"

Programming is easiest if the results are immediate, trying to teach a 5 year old a language that needs an entire program to be preentered into a text file or even compiled wouldn't be much of a success.

That said, young kids learn extremely fast and she was asking almost within minutes how many different colours there were and what the biggest numbers she could use were, or how to make sounds. Fun times! :)

Games/Projects Currently In Development:
Discord RPG Bot | D++ - The Lightweight C++ Discord API Library | TriviaBot Discord Trivia Bot

jpetrie

13,220

February 23, 2015 11:31 PM

"Learning programming" at such a young age is nothing like learning programming at an older age, but still very possible.

Rather than learning syntax and keywords, like you might now, young children can be exposed to simple logical concepts such as associations between interface and action, storing things for later, and breaking complex ideas down into simple ones ("complex ideas" for a five year old are very simple already, so this is particularly straightforward).

Children are knowledge sponges, and framed the proper way and with the proper high-level tools you they can learn a lot of surprising things. But you won't be sticking them in front of a terminal with vim, gcc and the Rust user manual and expecting them to learn that.

Tutorial Doctor

2,574

Author

February 23, 2015 11:34 PM

That is great advice. That immediate results thing is ideal even for me. Not long ago I found out what a REPL was. A basic language that is easy to understand with a REPL for immediate response sounds good. But I wonder if there is such a thing.

Or maybe that is a venture I will take myself.

They call me the Tutorial Doctor.

Brain

19,058

February 23, 2015 11:44 PM

That is great advice. That immediate results thing is ideal even for me. Not long ago I found out what a REPL was. A basic language that is easy to understand with a REPL for immediate response sounds good. But I wonder if there is such a thing.

Or maybe that is a venture I will take myself.

Old command line driven basic interpreters work this way, you can either issue a command and the system executes it immediately:

> PRINT "HELLO"

HELLO

Or you can put a line number on the start, and it stores it until it is told to run it:

> 10 PRINT “HELLO"

> 20 GOTO 10

> RUN

HELLO

...

This is ideal for teaching. Look up "BBC BASIC" for example. There are interpreters for Windows, dos, Linux and more, and 30 years of documentation.

Be careful though as it can teach some bad habits like spaghetti programming!

I cut my teeth on this language, and some days I look at C++ and miss the simplicity of my old 8 bit...

The computer this language was included with was designed for use in primary schools (first grade) and shared massive success in the UK much like the apple ][ in the US: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

If you can find one for an affordable price, they're lots of fun :)

Games/Projects Currently In Development:
Discord RPG Bot | D++ - The Lightweight C++ Discord API Library | TriviaBot Discord Trivia Bot

TheChubu

9,484

February 24, 2015 12:03 AM

I cut my teeth on this language, and some days I look at C++ and miss the simplicity of my old 8 bit...

Looking at C++ makes you miss the simplicity of everything else ever made.

More on topic: Well, there are 5 year old learning how to play piano, or how to dance, or how to paint, or how to read (reading is a very complex thing mind you), I don't see how learning to code is that much different. Hopefully they'll code 5 or 10 more years and then choose a more sane hobby/profession when they get out of high school :D

"I AM ZE EMPRAH OPENGL 3.3 THE CORE, I DEMAND FROM THEE ZE SHADERZ AND MATRIXEZ"

My journals: dustArtemis ECS framework and Making a Terrain Generator

HyperV

1,719

February 24, 2015 12:16 AM

Hi,

Have you looked at Scratch? https://scratch.mit.edu/

Maybe this could help.

HyperV

Bregma

9,461

February 24, 2015 12:29 AM

Were you hacking calculators at that age?

Electronic calculators hadn't even been invented when I was that age. I do have memories, however, of using a slide rule at age 5 to help my mother (a science teacher) calculate grades for her class. There's something about manipulating things given a particular input and having the output just appear that is just like programming. Just like it. So when my mother brought home a CARDIAC a couple year later it was easy to make the leap.

My kids at age 5 could barely use a mouse to make Reader Rabbit identify patterens. Now of course they can text and google and download illegal content like any other young adults or teens, and my younger daughter can frag evil guys and zombies with the best of them, but nobody in my house has ever show any desire to make electrons dance. Hashtag sadface.

Stephen M. Webb
Professional Free Software Developer

kseh

3,998

February 24, 2015 12:40 AM

Old command line driven basic interpreters work this way, you can either issue a command and the system executes it immediately:

> PRINT "HELLO"
HELLO
Or you can put a line number on the start, and it stores it until it is told to run it:
> 10 PRINT “HELLO"
> 20 GOTO 10
> RUN

HELLO
...

This is pretty much how I started learning programming on an Apple 2E at around age 10. It's not hard for a kid to understand that anything between the quotation marks will be displayed on the screen.

For someone learning at 5 years old though, that's around grade 1 where I live. Me, I was still learning addition and subtraction at the time and multiplication was at least another grade away and took quite awhile to get the hang of. And though somewhere in there I understood that the "hungry alligator's mouth" always opened towards the larger number, I remember it took awhile to connect that thought to the words "greater than" or "less than". Though a 5 year old kid could probably pick up this stuff, I think the thing to remember is that there's the fundamental fundamentals that he's still going to be in the process of learning.

My 8 year old nephew expressed an interest in learning programming and I'm kicking myself for not buying this book I found in a grocery store a few months ago. I didn't have a chance to look at it carefully but it reminded me of the things I started learning on. I've ordered it last week and I'm hoping that it'll turn out to be a good start for him.