Warren Seen

I was just jokingly informed by my ten year old stepson that he intends to build “some kind of mind reading device, so I can extract all your knowledge about computers and rule the world!”

Hmmm, evil genius in training. After discussing whether we should inform his mother of his plans for world domination, he informed me that the reason *I* did not rule the world was because I don’t have a “master plan for world domination.” apparently, HE does.

But it did get me to thinking that it’s high time I start passing on some of my kung foo to him. In the past he has expressed an interest in programming, but really hasn’t had the background to understand the concepts. (It’s very difficult to explain programming to folks that don’t understand basic algebra, IMO)
(side note: it seems the career of “games developer” is this generation’s “astronaut”, as he is quite intent that is what he wants to do when he grows up. I haven’t the heart to explain to him that the developers spend very little time actually playing the games :-))

Anyway, I think that 10 is probably a good age to start learning these things, but unfortunately I don’t really know where to start. I’ve seen some sites before about teaching kids Python, but since:

a) I don’t know Python, an
b) I don’t need to know it to function at this point in time

I’m wondering if there is something similar out there using Ruby? Ruby’s consistent, natural syntax, everything is an object approach and the instant gratification of 0 compile time makes it ideal in my eyes for this task.

Maybe I should just point him to the Programming Ruby book and leave him alone for a while?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 2:19 pm and is filed under kids, programming, ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.