playful coding problems for 10 year olds

[Arnaud Delobelle]

Daniel Fetchinson <fetchinson at googlemail.com> writes:

> Hi folks,
>
> My niece is interested in programming and python looks like a good
> choice (she already wrote a couple of lines :)) She is 10 and I
> thought it would be good to have a bunch of playful coding problems
> for her, stuff that she could code herself maybe after some initial
> help.
>
> Do you guys know problems like these? Or a good resource where to look
> them up?
>
> Cheers,
> Daniel

I don't have a list of problems, but I think it's nice to have an
environment that provides a very easy way to draw graphics and interact
with the user (the way it could be done in the 80s on most personal
computers). If you want to use Python, Pyprocessing [1] is an attempt to
provide such an environment.

Python has a sig that might be relevant: edu-sig [2].  The web page has
a lot of links.

Finally, I have written an online programming game [3] provisionally
called "Robo2flags" where the player has to direct a robot through a
maze to catch all the flags it contains.  But the robot can't be
controlled in real-time; you have to design a circuit board for it (in
fact, a program). It's not quite the finished product, but it works and
the server is in Python!  It needs a browser that implements canvas
though (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Safari).

[1] http://code.google.com/p/pyprocessing/
[2] http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/
[3] http://www.marooned.org.uk/robo

-- 
Arnaud