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What is the youngest possible age to start learning how to code?

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  • 26-04-2018 2:48pm
    #1
    kenji_ie
    Registered Users Posts: 2 ✭


    Two related questions:

    (1) What would be the youngest possible age at which a human being can start learning how to code?

    (2) What would your approach be to teaching a child of that age?


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    #2
    Talisman
    Registered Users Posts: 6,010 ✭✭✭Talisman


    What is the earliest age at which a human being can problem solve?


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    #3
    John_Mc
    Registered Users Posts: 2,790 ✭✭✭John_Mc


    kenji_ie wrote: »
    Two related questions:

    (1) What would be the youngest possible age at which a human being can start learning how to code?

    (2) What would your approach be to teaching a child of that age?

    I was down visiting my brother and his family at the weekend and my 7 year old nephew was showing me his programming game/app.

    It's called Scratch. Pretty amazing really and it's got the whole open source concept similar to Github where you can make your games and upload them for others to play and see how you did it.

    I'd imagine there are outliers from the genius kids but I'd imagine most children aged 6+ would be able to get their head around the concepts etc


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    #4
    Talisman
    Registered Users Posts: 6,010 ✭✭✭Talisman


    Celebrating 50 years of Kids Coding (Google Doodle: 4 December 2017)

    4/5 year olds were completing this once they understood what was involved in the task.


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    #5
    bbbbb
    Registered Users Posts: 731 ✭✭✭bbbbb


    7 yrs old, according to coder dojo?
    https://coderdojo.com


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    #6
    igCorcaigh
    Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators Posts: 11,090 Mod ✭✭✭✭igCorcaigh


    Any age really, but I started at 12 and I think the early teenage years is a time of analytical thinking and categorisation.


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    #7
    threein99
    Closed Accounts Posts: 3,596 ✭✭✭threein99


    if baby_status == 'born':


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    #8
    srsly78
    Registered Users Posts: 7,157 ✭✭✭srsly78


    If you aren't playing Knuth to the baby in utero then you can just forget about them having any future in this industry.


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    #9
    Herlihy82
    Registered Users Posts: 10 ✭Herlihy82


    Probably should make a distinction between visual programming (Scratch, Blockly, Alice, etc.) which are used by primary school kids and often designed for kids -- MIT (developers of Scratch) recommend Scratch for 8-16 year-olds for example -- and text-based programming (Python etc.) which would be later. The book "Pythons for Kids" recommends age 10+ for example.


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    #10
    micks_address
    Registered Users Posts: 8,461 ✭✭✭micks_address


    I wouldn't be to bothered about programming at a young age. Logic, problem solving and things like that be much more useful and are language independent..


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    #11
    Talisman
    Registered Users Posts: 6,010 ✭✭✭Talisman


    Herlihy82 wrote: »
    Probably should make a distinction between visual programming (Scratch, Blockly, Alice, etc.) which are used by primary school kids and often designed for kids -- MIT (developers of Scratch) recommend Scratch for 8-16 year-olds for example -- and text-based programming (Python etc.) which would be later. The book "Pythons for Kids" recommends age 10+ for example.
    Visual programming stuff like Scratch is remedial and any child I know that has the natural inclination for programming outgrow it quite quickly.

    There are plenty of kids that will take some code change one thing and pass it off as their own work without knowing how the thing works. These are generally the ones that will break something and won't try to figure out why - they aren't problem solvers.

    Computational Fairy Tales is a very good book for getting a high level overview of computer science concepts and is definitely suitable for kids.


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    #12
    14ned
    Registered Users Posts: 768 ✭✭✭14ned


    kenji_ie wrote: »
    Two related questions:

    (1) What would be the youngest possible age at which a human being can start learning how to code?

    (2) What would your approach be to teaching a child of that age?

    Well, for me the programming bug bit aged six. Saved up for and bought an Acorn Electron. Though I was considered very odd for spending hours typing in printed computer programs written in Acorn BASIC or 6502. Still, a great grounding in the fundamentals, it's carried me to today where you know exactly just how much code and data can fit into 256 bytes.

    Aged eleven or twelve or so I was sent to the LOGO programming classes run at that time in Cork but I found them exceptionally easy. I kept running into the limits of LOGO, and discovered that it was derived from LISP which turned out to be much more useful. LISP had some power to it.

    Now, all that said, and I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, but the level of abstraction has moved on. Back in the early 80s, assembler/BASIC was the abstraction level. Nowadays it's more Python. And Python is very considerably more abstract than 1980's BASIC.

    So I'm not sure the exact same rules apply. Me aged six facing Python? Might have been a bit too mind bendy, too hard. Assembler, in many ways, is much easier to reason about for children. It has nice fixed rules. No need to understand objects, functions, procedures, i/o or any of that stuff. Just load a register, add to a register, compare a register, if equal store a register. Almost anybody can "get" assembler, even the very young.

    Niall


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