1. Learning Resources Code & Go Robot Mouse Activity Set 2. The Official ScratchJr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code
They really like playing that. They are at the age that nothing lasts long though. Both are lot of fun and laugh - especially when mouse gets out of board and can't find the cheese (dummy mouse! hahaha!). And in application you can do crazy stuff, including your kids' funny voices etc.
Play, have fun (and the kids will not be aware of learning of logical thinking).
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01A5YMCH4/ref=oh_aui_de...
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1593276710/ref=oh_aui_de...
The first method was with my 12yr old. She wanted to learn programming so I got her signed up on Exercism.IO in the Python track. She did pretty well but then lost steam (actually we both kind of did) within a few weeks.
The second method I used was with my 14yr old. She had a science fair project that required a VOC sensor. We planned the project, ordered the pieces and then coded an Arduino sketch together.
I personally feel like method two had the best results. Project based learning, in general, seems to hold the attention of both the student and the teacher far more effectively. Further, I think we often forget that programming is a tool; a means to some end. If that end is something we strongly desire to achieve we will be more willing to trudge through the somewhat dry and boring aspects of introductory programming.
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This year, however, when he was still 10, something changed, and he got pretty interested to go through the coding course in Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming). He has been doing math there for a couple of years, so it was a natural additional course. I was amazed at how well the coding course is built there, with good explanation videos and a sandbox coding editor, which prompts on errors in real-time and displays results immediately in adjacent window.
His other interest came from Roblox, where he likes to play with friends, and that has a Roblox studio to build your own game. You can build your own world in this studio just like in Minecraft, but to add game logic to it, you need to add scripts. The problem there however is that it uses Lua for scripting language, which is not as easy for me to help him with, and the API to access different parts/objects of the game requires lots of Googling and understanding of the Roblox architecture. So far, I’ve been writing some short code for him (with lots of googling), and he was modifying it to fit his game needs. But hopefully he gets it eventually to it himself.
