Fun Links 2016-01-29

Since tomorrow is my son’s third birthday, I’d say it is high time he starts to learn to program. I need him (l)earning ASAP. A common goal for any geeky parent, but how do you go about it?

Below are some educational tools and resources aimed at teaching programming whether to someone very young or anyone in general. And even if you know how to program already, the learning never stops.

ABC++
http://inedo.com/abc
ABC++ is a book published by the same team who created ProGet and BuildMaster two great .NET-focused DevOps tools. On one hand it is an ordinary alphabet book for teaching kids their letters, on the other hand, it is a list of programming languages with code samples. The site has a link to Amazon where you can get the book for about $12 USD, but the content of the book is available on the site as well.

Codecademy
https://www.codecademy.com
Codecademy doesn’t target children per se, but I suspect older kids would be able to complete some of their courses. They aim to teach the world to program, and they are taking a fresh look at education in the digital age. They have courses on web technologies as well as Python, Ruby, and Java. You can even learn about Git or SQL. The learning catalog is free, but they have a pro account with more tooling around tailoring a custom solution.

Scratch
https://scratch.mit.edu/
Scratch is a partly a programming language, partly a community. It targets kids from 8 to 16 and was created by a group from MIT. It is free of charge. It does require Flash in your browser though to use the visual editor. It looks like a fun system to teach concepts to kids through fun and engaging projects.