Python for kids?

[Luis M. González]

This is a very good advice.
I learned from my own experience in college that trying to learn a
solution to a problem I never had, is wasted time.
The first step is confronting your student with an specific problem,
then let him try to find a way to solve it by himself.
After he tried hard many approaches to solving the problem with his
limited knowledge, show him the right way.
This way he will see the light.

I believe that many teachers don't know this basic concept, and they
simply teach in a mechanical way, without having their students
interested in the subject or without having explained them what
exactly these skills are good for.

Luis

On Dec 7, 5:37 pm, bearophileH... at lycos.com wrote:
> On Dec 7, 9:13 pm, "Russ P." <Russ.Paie... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I have a 12-year-old son who spends too much time playing Xbox live
> > and watching silly YouTube videos. I would like to try to get him
> > interested in programming.
>
> Lot of people learn to program even before age of 12.
> But I think it's better for you to help him get interest in problem-
> solving and some of the other bases of the mathematic, scientific and
> computational mindset. Once those interests are in place, he will
> probably go looking by himself for things like programming languages,
> math and science (of course at that point a gentle guide toward good
> ideas, good problems to solve, good books to read and good programming
> languages, helps).
>
> Otherwise you risk pushing a person to learn using a tool (programming
> is interesting by itself, but it's mostly a tool still) before having
> any use for such tool or desire to learn it. And this may lead to
> someone with no passion to solve problems and learn.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile