How young can kids learn to code?

Question

I'd love to get my kids started. Are they too small at 1? 4? 7? I'm guessing my 10yo would manage. He'd enjoy it I'd say!

Answer 1

This might be totally wrong and I might have misremebered, but I have heard that kids below ~12 have a hard time understanding the concept of variables, and that's why symbolic manipulation and algebra with variables is being taught only a few years into middle school.

That's not to say you can't start exposing kids to programming earlier than that but you'll have to tailor the experience specifically to them and try to keep the code as "concrete" as possible (as opposed to abstract). Scratch might be a good place to start!

EDIT: I remember animating stick figures in microsoft powerpoint as a kid. You're defining a sequence of events so it's similar to programming, and very visual and hands-on. You can try that with your young ones aswell.

Answer 2

Honestly, in my opinion, you can never be too young to start coding (unless, of course, you're < 1 and you can barely use a keyboard). If you want to get them started with something easier, I would recommend introducing them to Scratch which helps teach the basics of how programs are structured and how they run, and once they get the hang of that maybe you could move on to showing them some more complicated stuff. As for your 7/10 year olds, might as well start them off coding right away if you want to! I personally started when I was around 8 and although at that age I could only write simple programs, it definitely was fun and worth spending my time learning it at that age as it helped out with learning to code today haha. If they don't seem too interested in it though, don't try forcing it on as doing so may take away from the fun of learning to program, so my best suggestion would be to just let them explore and don't be too hard on them if they don't get it at first or they're not too interested haha 😄

Answer 3

This is a similar question. It should help.

https://www.sololearn.com/Discuss/937763/?ref=app

Answer 4

I would say you could start around 6 or 7. Programming does work with numbers, so as long as they are capable of learning simple addition, they could start learning programming.

Answer 5

Any age is good to learn coding, except age below 2.
If you're below 2 years old, you cannot learn to code, since your brain memorize system is not fully developed, you can't have firm memory to store yet.

Answer 6

Thank you! They already used scratch actually. I haven't looked at Alice.org that's mentioned in the similar question. Must check that out. I'd like to get them some tasks for scratch though. They got bored messing about after I showed them sone basics and they haven't tried in about a year now I'd say! No worries about me pressuring anyone lol