playful coding problems for 10 year olds

[Daniel Fetchinson]

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

 

[Dirk Nachbar]

This is in JS but have a look here http://github.com/ryanmcgrath/splash

 

[Arnaud Delobelle]

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

 

[Martin v. Loewis]

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.

I think anything that has to do with drawing and colors will be
attractive, animated if possible. It has to look nice.

Take a look at the turtle demos.

Regards,
Martin

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Take a look at the turtle demos.

Are turtle graphics still enough to hold the kids’ interest these days?

I’ve been visiting a local Computer Clubhouse, and it seems like they mostly
spend their time in Google SketchUp and Photoshop. I managed to get one
older one interested in Blender. What kind of easy programming exercises
could compare with that?

 

[Emile van Sebille]

On 11/1/2010 2:48 PM Martin v. Loewis said...

I think anything that has to do with drawing and colors will be
attractive, animated if possible. It has to look nice.

Take a look at the turtle demos.

Six or eight years ago when my kids were about that age I got them to
play around with pygame, but frankly, I had more success getting them to
read html and identify cut n paste-able fragments to put in their
myspaceface places.

Emile

 

[Jonathan Hartley]

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

There's a great book valled 'Invent your own computer games using
Python', aimed at kids, which teaches programming from tne ground up,
in the context of writing games, starting with terminal word games,
ending with Pygame fullscreen 2D vector graphic & bitmaps affairs.
http://inventwithpython.com/

The website says aimed at kids 'ages 10 to 12 and upwards', so it
sounds like she's on the minimum cusp.

(now I come to look at the website, one of the quotes he features is
from an Amazon review I wrote months ago!

 

[Daniel Fetchinson]

Hi folks,

There's a great book valled 'Invent your own computer games using
Python', aimed at kids, which teaches programming from tne ground up,
in the context of writing games, starting with terminal word games,
ending with Pygame fullscreen 2D vector graphic & bitmaps affairs.
http://inventwithpython.com/

The website says aimed at kids 'ages 10 to 12 and upwards', so it
sounds like she's on the minimum cusp.

(now I come to look at the website, one of the quotes he features is
from an Amazon review I wrote months ago!

Thanks a lot for everyone for the suggestions,
I think I'll be able to cook things up from all
the references you sent!

Cheers,
Daniel

 

[Neil Cerutti]

I think anything that has to do with drawing and colors will be
attractive, animated if possible. It has to look nice.

Take a look at the turtle demos.

The book _Simply Scheme_ contains a lot of word problems, which I
think is quite nice. possessive,is_palindrom, pig_latin, and so
forth might make good Python exercises, too.

 

[Aahz]

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.

What other interests does she have? Might Python play a role?

http://micheinnz.livejournal.com/1080735.html

(Agent Weasel ended up making a presentation at the NZ PyCon.)