#846 overall
Hour of Code
Code.org
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2021 · score 0.7
Hour of Code is a short, introductory block-based coding activity from Code.org, aimed at getting beginners, especially young children, to try programming. It uses visual drag-and-drop blocks, with many tutorials built around popular games and characters.
One commenter used it as the first step for their child at age five, followed by Blockly Games and then Khan Academy JavaScript.
General Learningbeginnerfreeinteractive MOOC#block-based coding#blockly#children#introduction to programming#code.org
Recommendations by year
20062026
Path for an eight year old (who started at 5):
1) Hour of Code and Blockly, as well as some Blockly Games, age 5-7
2) Khan Academy JavaScript and processing.js at age 7.
He's pretty awesome at JavaScript now. The programming courses on Khan Academy are great. I will mention your child needs to be ready for it. At that age, a few months one way or the other is huge, as is having the mechanics of typing and mousing.
Next step from there is the book "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Developer Best Practices) " and Nandgame, as well as Micro:bit.
I recommend against Scratch. It's a rabbithole that goes in the wrong direction. You get stuck in a local minimum, where it's really hard to move onto real programming, and within Scratch, there are a lot of local minima (move to random position).