On Saturday, March 3, 2018 at 8:41:16 AM UTC-5, Paulo Matos wrote: > > Hello, > > I have a 7yo daughter currently in 1st grade (Germany) and she was given > a password for the school computer. Having never touched a computer > before she is now being introduced to typing and the mouse. > > I wonder if anyone has any experience with the following: > > 1. Is it useful for a child this age to get introduced to programming if > they are not actively looking to learn? > 2. Is racket a good way to introduce it? > 3. Is 7yo / 1st grade a good time or too early and I should wait? >
I used Racket with both my children at age 9. Here is a short writeup about it originally posted to this mailing list. https://web.archive.org/web/20080612194829/http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/class/hs/testimonials/prabhakar.shtml In answer to your questions, I would say (1) Demo it and see what they think, but let it be their decision; (2) Yes, the best one I know of!; (3) They need the potential to grasp the abstractions that an identifier may refer to a specific value or may range over all values, and the ability to distinguish those two situations. Seven might be a bit young, but you know your child best. Bootstrap did not exist when my children were the right age, and I would definitely think about that now. Neil is right that some light instruction combined with suggested but not required exercises and encouragement to explore is best. Of course that has to be tailored to the situation. Exploration can be frustrating if things are obscure or counterintuitive. And my younger child wanted to learn how to use Terminal in OS X by typing things into it. I had to explain why that was dangerous! --PR -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
