Scrimba is $19/month, and aimed at adults. From the front page, you build boring stuff, and it's not clear where to go. Quality is mixed
For general coding for kids, there's a bunch of really excellent things:
* Khan Academy JavaScript is fantastic. You learn JavaScript building interesting things, learning both deep and shallow concepts.
* code.org tends to be an hour long, but that hour is beautifully scripted. It doesn't go far, but is really nice for getting started.
Scratch, Blockly Games, Open Processing, and a bunch of others do a nice job picking up from there.
Where there is a gap is on tying code to hardware, which this starts to close. What I liked about this is you start with something physical. This isn't just coding. It's coding+electronics. It's surprisingly hard to find good stuff for RPi, Arduino, or similar. There are:
* Great robotics platforms, without software support or tutorials
* Decent software, where there is a game of making it work with pick-your-own-hardware.
* Decent tutorials, bogged down by lousy platforms, no integrated way to get the stuff you need, etc.
* Etc.
There isn't anything clear, integrated, and coherent like the ones above (KA/Scratch/etc.) that I know of.
And have a 5-minutes-to-get-started thing, and from there, ways to go deep, it'd be a pretty big hit. No organization seems to do all three pieces well:
* Hardware
* Software
* Pedagogy
Perhaps since they're such different skills, or perhaps because it's too big a task.
> Scrimba is $19/month, and aimed at adults. From the front page, you build boring stuff, and it's not clear where to go. Quality is mixed
I linked the python course in the original comment but mostly recommend scrimba for building learning material for kids because you can mess with the code and run it inside the video directly. It's free for that.
Have you tried using something from the magpie, sparkfun and other kit suppliers?
Any elaboration on the specific product would be helpful. I want to know what kind of kits aren't available or upto the mark.
But I totally understand the current market could be better. I have spent a good chunk of time finding parts for raspberry Pi although the projects were a bit more complex and budget constrained. I got them from various Chinese market places and had to read up a bit.
I like Sparkfun, but it's not batteries included. You run into the first major roadblock before you've started:
"Please Note: If you haven't worked with Alchitry boards before, you will need to head over to their website to get set up and running before continuing with this tutorial."
... and you're down a rabbithole.
Next, it splits on Cu versus Au boards.
And by the end, it looks like I have a blinking LED.
And I need to spend over $100 to get started. $100 is okay if I knew there was a good, frictionless pathway to the end. But in this case, I don't. It's gluing a half-dozen pieces together, and my experience is that 75% of the time, the kit ends up with some bug along the way, and lands in a drawer.
The places I listed JUST WORK. That's a big difference.
It's also important it feed into something. Half the time, companies will invent their own programming language, environment, or something, and at the end, we're at a dead end. I've never heard of Lucid. If I were doing an FPGA project, I'd start with VHDL or Verilog and standard tools. And clicking through, many of the tools used in this tutorial are now several layers obsoleted.
For general coding for kids, there's a bunch of really excellent things:
* Khan Academy JavaScript is fantastic. You learn JavaScript building interesting things, learning both deep and shallow concepts.
* code.org tends to be an hour long, but that hour is beautifully scripted. It doesn't go far, but is really nice for getting started.
Scratch, Blockly Games, Open Processing, and a bunch of others do a nice job picking up from there.
Where there is a gap is on tying code to hardware, which this starts to close. What I liked about this is you start with something physical. This isn't just coding. It's coding+electronics. It's surprisingly hard to find good stuff for RPi, Arduino, or similar. There are:
* Great robotics platforms, without software support or tutorials
* Decent software, where there is a game of making it work with pick-your-own-hardware.
* Decent tutorials, bogged down by lousy platforms, no integrated way to get the stuff you need, etc.
* Etc.
There isn't anything clear, integrated, and coherent like the ones above (KA/Scratch/etc.) that I know of.
If someone were to take a:
* best-of-breed cheap kid-friendly robotics platform
* integrate it with arduino or rpi
* integrate it with JavaScript or Python
And have a 5-minutes-to-get-started thing, and from there, ways to go deep, it'd be a pretty big hit. No organization seems to do all three pieces well:
* Hardware
* Software
* Pedagogy
Perhaps since they're such different skills, or perhaps because it's too big a task.