How can I teach my 9 year old brother to feel comfortable with learning to code

Question

I have 9 year old brother who is enthusiastic about writing code but gets easily bored and wants to hurrily build the next Pokemon game, he knows alit bit about algorithms and a few if statements but when I get to loops he gets so confused and so bored, am I using the wrong approach to teaching him or is he too young to learn to code

Answer 1

Set a schedule for learning to program, don't rush in learning. It can take month to get feel in programming, set goal what kind of app he want to build using the language. It can motivate the kid because he have a purpose to learn. It doesn't need to be complex, some console application would be enough, Download source code of some working app in github and let him experiment with it

Answer 2

give the app Hopscotch a try. this is a game coding app.
but you will have to learn it yourself first before letting him at it. it is not always easy.

also you can try arduino and there are sites where you can code with blocks of code without typing. for example ArduBlock

and come to think of it you can take a look at Processing (the language) which is a java/c based language where you draw stuff but its also easy enough to make small games.

as with all, make sure you have a good grasp of the material you want to teach your brother, it is important to stay ahead of him so you can help him at his level.

Answer 3

9 years is pretty young. iirc that's when you start multiplying/dividing multi-digit numbers in school.
Which are algorithms using loops by the way, so I'm sure the kids understand the concept. But for loops in programming languages are pretty abstract compared to that.

Maybe make him realize whenever he's looping in real life, like when he empties the dishwasher or something.

I've enjoyed python's turtle module to teach newcomers (not kids though) as it's very concrete and visual. Maybe you could give that a try to teach basic loops, here's how you draw an arc:

for i in range(0, 20):
forward(10)
left(5)

I don't think it gets any simpler than that. If he has troubles with that maybe don't push it and write loop-less code instead. Most self-taught kids I know all started to code right around age 12-13.