I’ve been tempted to teach my daughter programming with scratch. At what age did you introduce your daughter to Scratch and programming? Where there any helpful/fun guides you or she discovered along the way?
I introduced to my kids at around 6 and 8. 6 was maybe a little early, but not much (and will vary by kid, of course).
One thing that really added to the fun when they were making games is I got a PS3 controller (which is bluetooth) and connected that to the computer as a keyboard, which Scratch code can then read and use in the games.
The first big (for them) project we did was: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/219423211/ They had just turned 7 and 9 when we did that and dad helped them out with a fair bit of guidance (and cribbing from other projects), but after this one, they really took to playing around with it on their own and a few times per month, I'll look over and see Adam using scratch around 5 years later.
PS: There is a Scratch Jr if your kids don't seem quite old enough to have the attention span/focus for scratch.
In spite of learning Logo at 6, I didn’t try to introduce programming to my kids, but my 7yo daughter picked up Scratch-based web programming during school where they did Hour of Code. (Pleasantly surprised considering Texas’ slow bleeding of public schools.) It’s a free site filled with focused, guided activities using block programming and probably other languages. One is Dance Party where you sequence dancers and their stage to a music track, and in another you teach Elsa to skate patterns into the ice in a modern twist on Logo.
They do a lot of Minecraft now but are interested in TinkerCAD, which I’ll solidify by printing some of their designs. Not sure any of the beginner CAD apps are really easy, though.
She uses it at school, but no one taught her how to use it. She has followed tutorials for making games on Roblox Studio in the past. However, kids just hit the ground running with Scratch way better than adults.
