Hey Ax, Klaus and any other parents of school-age kids....
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I'm looking for something like Project Euler but for a young kid (10).
I'm familiar with hour of code, scratch, etc but that seems to be heavy on moving sprites around a screen and light on algorithms and data processing.
Right now I'm writing my own homework assignments for the boy but I'd love to know if there's something out there.
Example: current assignment is to write (in stages) a program that will find the prime factors of a number. 1st stage, just write a program that will accept input, verify it's a number in a range, and then write out a count down to zero. (get him comfy with input, output, and a basic loop). 2nd stage, just check to see if a number is prime. 3rd stage, find the factors.
That kind of thing.
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Scratch, Blockly, Hour of Code, Hopscotch, Playgrounds etc. - I know these approaches very well, but I think they all make a fundamental mistake. They lure the kids into the programming field with the "gaming" bait. All kids think they can soon write their own version of Fortnite or the like. But of course they are disappointed quickly because they can't. On the other hand, these approaches never teach kids the fascinating aspects of the matter itself. That's why most kids give up after some initial excitement. I have a quite different view on the matter. The supposedly "theoretical" stuff that never shows up in any of the above approaches (what is abstraction, functional decomposition, quality control, what is an algorithm etc.) is what I start with.
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One initiative in the US that I like a lot is this one. I know the people who organize this very well. Maybe there's something for your kid, too.
https://www.bootstrapworld.org/ -
Another educational approach which I like and which is broadly along the lines you describe.
If he's grown out of that stuff, this is maybe the best introduction to programming (which won the most prestigious teaching awards) on the planet:
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Thanks I'll take a look.
Very cool about your class, Klaus.
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This list has some age appropriate tasks.
