Hi all,
A fair while ago I asked the community here advice as my 8yo lad wanted to experiment with programming: Old Post.
Thanks so much for all the words of wisdom - there’s still stuff we can explore in the replies.
Thought I’d just give a little update.
So I installed dual boot Linux Mint / OSX on an old intel MacBook Air (dual boot in case his homework/school stuff needs it, but he hasn’t used OSX much!).
It was much easier than I thought it’d be. Perhaps it’s just the hardware/OS choice, but I don’t consider myself to be ‘properly’ technical and it was a breeze. Perhaps the only difficult part was creating a bootable OSX restore disk just in case I destroyed the OS… it’s almost like Mac really don’t want you to be doing this.
He’s working his way through foundational courses on programming, in codeacademy, and using scratch as usual. So far, so good.
Is there an IDE you’d recommend that has some element of a tutorial to it?
This is very true; if it’s not fun, why bother. Granted, fun is subjective, but the point stands, I think
If the kid wants to make games, I would suggest fantasy consoles, aka things like PICO-8, TIC-80, etc. Dunno how easy it would be to be at this stage, though