My 10yo (Pradyumn) got interested in coding last year. I wasn’t so sure about it in the beginning since I didn’t want to force my career choices or interests on to him. But I realized that he wanted to do it of his own accord, so I agreed to help him. But our deal was that I will introduce him a bit to the learning resources and help him out with his doubts here and there, while he will peruse all the learning material and build his things on his own without much interference/interaction with me.

I took the regular path of introducing him to scratch and code.org initially, since that’s what I have seen being recommended for kids at many places. He got bored of them quite quickly though as he didn’t feel that he was coding enough, plus he felt limited in expressing himself.

I then gave him a python book and he spent a couple of months learning that. He was quite into it and made few programs and games with the concepts he learnt from here. He felt quite happy with it except that he was mostly restricted to the command line programs. He found out about pygame and made a few graphical games which gave him a new high, but felt let down when he learnt he couldn’t share them easily with his friends and family since there was no easy packaging mechanism, plus a lot of the folks he wanted to share them with would just see it on the phone/tablets etc which won’t run python stuff anyways. He did find a few sites/programs that promised to translate these programs to mobile apps and all but they all seemed to have tricky corners to navigate.

At this point, instead of having his time spent in packaging etc, I introduced him to the idea of learning HTML/CSS/Javascript. I myself don’t have much experience in the field of programming for the web, but I felt (and was instantly vindicated seeing his face light up) that this path will help achieve his goals and motivate him to keep learning. He researched about resources on this for a few days and asked me to buy him a couple of udemy courses which I did. He’s been going through this over the past month and made a couple of programs and a website to showcase them. As an aside, he also learnt a bit of git and github. I connected a domain to his github repository and here it is: https://pradyumngoel.com/

I don’t really have any hopes/wishes linked to this, as I would fully support him to go into whichever field he likes. But the first step towards that is that the kids get to experience the various things that are available to them as choices. He’s been trying various sports and other activities in the past and I’m glad he is keen towards learning new things on his own and expanding his horizons.