Teaching my children programming II

First time with a computer. This is getting serious!

Elisa is using a MacBook Pro and Leandro is using a Lenovo T440 with Fedora. Both are on the terminal, ready to learn and with a weird look on their faces that says "what the heck is this boring screen".

The lesson starts. We fire up an interactive node session and we go at it.

a = 1;
b = 2;
c = a + b;

They cheer with every output and seem to be getting all the memory ideas from the last lesson.

We talk about strings. We store them in variables and have some fun:

name = "dad";
greeting = "Hi, " + name;

Of course Leandro wrote something more like:

Lol = "Leandro";
greeting = "Hi, " + Lol;

I let them have their fun. It has to be a bit dry to look at a terminal when you are 10 when you could be playing Among Us.

I explain the concept of true and false, and explain how they differ from a simple string. I also explain and show an example of an if statement. They get surprisingly excited about this one. I think it's because they feel they are starting to communicate with the computer in English.

Since I am making this up as I go, I am considering my next steps. Again they seemed to have fun, but I won't be able to keep this up if things don't get challenging and interesing. I am considering switching to Lua + Love2D. I am not familiar with the language but I hear it's very simple and you can get results quickly. I think it could be a good next step for someone used to immediate visual feedback in Scratch.

Teaching my children programming II

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