Teaching young children to program?

My daughters are much older, but if I saw at a younger age that they were "attracted" to programming, coding, web designing, etc. I would have definitely supported their interests by encouraging them to become masters. Definitely.

Hi Amanda,

My girls are very young 3.5 and 1, but I think this is a very interesting question. Especially as other mums around me are talking about kids learning second languages.

In some ways I do focus on what I consider proto-programming skills - clarity (knowing what you want to do), process and structure. Oh yes, and tenacity. But I personally keep them away from screens as much as possible and they have no access to computers other then to watch a few youtube videos. They have so many other things to do. I don't see that changing anytime soon. My eldest has great language skills and great empathy and social skills. Who knows what programming languages they may be using in 20 years time but with solid foundations, I'm sure she can easily pick them up.

I've been showing my 11-year-old really basic/visual coding using just html and css. Sort of goes like this: Here's a part of the page we call a division (div). We can give it any name that makes sense to us. Let's call it "bluebox." Now let's add some style to our div using css. I then show how to define the size and shape of the box, the color and how to position it on the page. Again, real simple and in part to show how basic programming works and in part to take the mystery out of how things like games or webpages get created. My hope is that if/when an idea comes all of this will give a starting point for how to take action.

I'm not sure how young you're thinking of, but my youngest, who is 8, has always been interested in computers, coding etc and wants to grow up to be just like dad (my husband is a senior software engineer for a credit card processing company, and one of my son's favorite things to do is visit daddy at work)

Since things like keyboard skills, spelling, understanding syntax are really important for coding, we didn't start teaching him until he was 6 or almost 7. It's still basic stuff like coding a bit of html and css, kind of like how my husband and I learned way back in the early 80's making games on our Commodore 64's (yes, I am dating myself).

If you google coding for kids, there are several websites that pop up, and I remember reading not to long ago that Treehouse has a program in the works for kids. Also, in our school district, there is some coding taught in the middle schools in the technology classes, so at least in some places it's in the schools too, maybe not as young as your thinking, but still about the age where kids are developing hobbies and interests.