My 10y/o lad is very keen to get into coding so I’ve been looking around for online courses and have no idea really what I’m looking at that differentiates them so thought I’d ask here if anyone has a recommendation?

We went to a local CodeNinjas opening event at the weekend but the fees are pretty high and though I like the community aspect they’ll get there I can’t justify £75/month or the 1/2hr each way trip over. Especially as we’d have to send his sister at the same time so double costs.

I’d happily buy a Raspberry Pi and get started with that but he’s got an old laptop that could easily do most of what tat could (I assume)

Any advice or suggestions?

Cheers

Gary

A Pi would be good as would a coding book. Didn’t realise the ‘clubs’ were so expensive – a local cafe runs them for kids here, cheap as chips as my son used to help out !

An old laptop is perfectly acceptable, for some reason people think you need a RPi but almost all languages are available on any old laptop (except for stuff like Swift, which is mostly Apple-specific). Especially for stuff like Python, where the RPi just ships the standard developer environment. It’s only when you get to making lights blink and motors work that the RPi’s GPIO ports are useful.

My son’s school has used activities from hourofcode.com to teach basic programming, for what its worth.

fossy

Didn’t realise the ‘clubs’ were so expensive

To be fair to them it’s very very nice. It’s been set up in the local college building is all very shiny and new with lots of equipment and is a franchise set up and is actually staffed by paid students so no doubt they’ve lots of costs to recoup. Don’t begrudge them at all. Just can’t justify it myself.

rossburton

My son’s school has used activities from hourofcode.com to teach basic programming, for what its worth.

Thanks for the suggestion will have a look at this with him and see where it takes us. He and his sister are very keen to do some Minecraft Mods – whatever those are. ;o)

zx81 manual like the rest of us 🙂

Minecraft mods are Java aren’t they? Can’t say as that would be My First Language TBH.

Does he actually want to learn programming, or does he really just want to frob about under the hood in MC?

zx81 manual like the rest of us 🙂

I have a Spectrum on me desk right now.

Granted, a Spectrum Next, but. (-:

A couple of minutes’ googling:

https://codakid.com/guide-to-minecraft-modding-with-java/

That terrifies me, TBH!

Honestly, I’d be looking at a Pi starter kit. The barrier to entry for young coders is often “what do I do with it?” At its heart there’s nothing programmatically you could do with a Pi that you couldn’t do with a PC, but where the Pi wins is a) you can get a bag of switches and lights and make it actually Do Stuff, and b) it has a massive, mature community dripping with help and project ideas.

Just, y’know, don’t blow it up. There’s no electrical protection on the IO pins, start off with a cheap one.

Yes an old laptop will work.
Yes a RPi is good and provides opportunities to do other stuff that are maker/electronicy but for actual coding may not be the best starting point.
The issues for anyone trying to learn to code is 1. Where to start; 2. Where to turn when it just doesn’t work; 3. How to do things better / smarter etc.

With 1 and 2 some online tutorials, a book, and an interested parent with some patience and problem solving skills can get a long way. 3 is where it gets really hard, especially if you are trying to develop your own code/solution rather than just doing the official task… I think you also need to really understand pedagogy to do it well, sometimes it will be better to have learned a bad way to do something because it was quick to do rather than delve into the depths of polymorphism, recursion or other concepts too quickly, othertimes you’ve become so entrenched in your “bad” habits that doing it right is a whole new learning curve…

I have to admit I’m not sure he knows WHAT he wants to do with it I just think it’s a skillset that is going to be important in his (and his sister’s) life.

We’ve watched a lot of Mark Rober videos and he blurs the line between engineering and programming using Arduinos (sp?) which appear to be similar to Pis and I think it’d be good to start messing with similar things. He’s got engineering tendencies, probably as that’s what I do and is big into aeroplanes, so if we can combine all that in a few projects it should be a good base to learn all sorts from. I’ll see if I can pick a Pi up 2nd hand if they break easy ;o).

The Minecraft/Roblox thing is what they play often but I think it’s probably a bit advanced just yet. Will have to look into that too.

Thanks for the advice all.

I’m a few years ahead of you. My youngest is almost 12 now.

https://codecombat.com/

Is free for quite a bit of it. Choose python.

After that – get the raspberry jam mod pack for PC Minecraft. Lots of YouTube vids on how to install. Allows you to code Minecraft in python. Get them creating 100*100 tnt blocks. With my help my kid created a cannon, then 100 cannons etc…. Comes with many example files.