Hi all,

A fair while ago I asked the community here advice as my 8yo lad wanted to experiment with programming: Old Post.

Thanks so much for all the words of wisdom - there’s still stuff we can explore in the replies.

Thought I’d just give a little update.

So I installed dual boot Linux Mint / OSX on an old intel MacBook Air (dual boot in case his homework/school stuff needs it, but he hasn’t used OSX much!).

It was much easier than I thought it’d be. Perhaps it’s just the hardware/OS choice, but I don’t consider myself to be ‘properly’ technical and it was a breeze. Perhaps the only difficult part was creating a bootable OSX restore disk just in case I destroyed the OS… it’s almost like Mac really don’t want you to be doing this.

He’s working his way through foundational courses on programming, in codeacademy, and using scratch as usual. So far, so good.

Is there an IDE you’d recommend that has some element of a tutorial to it?

  • @foofiepieOP
    3•9 months ago

    Amazing thanks so much. Yes, structured ‘play’ might be just what he’s after. He can then tinker in an IDE - I did wonder if anyone had built one for kids specifically.

    I can teach him a bit of CLI / Shell and I’m ok if he bricks the computer, hence the choice of OS. Super easy for me to nuke and start again.

    I’ll be checking these out.