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Kids & Coding

Ben Halpern on June 29, 2022

The season 9 finale of DevDiscuss is here! Thank you so much for joining us over the past seven episodes. We hope you've enjoyed exploring a handfu...
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Mei Park

Late to this thread but it's so relevant to what I'm doing right now. I'm a dev (12 years, mostly backend/infra) turned stay-at-home mom, and my 3yo has been building browser games with me since he was 2.5. He can't read or type, but he can sit next to me and say "make a red car game, make it jump!" — I type his words into an AI chatbot, and we iterate together.

The thing I've learned is that computational thinking starts WAY earlier than most people assume. Sorting toys by color? That's categorization. Building a block tower in a specific order? Sequencing. "If it rains we stay inside" — that's conditional logic. Kids are already doing this, we just don't label it.

I actually wrote a whole curriculum around this — 12 weeks of hands-on activities (no screen required for most of it) plus AI-assisted game building for ages 2-6. The biggest surprise was how much the physical, tactile activities matter. The screen stuff is fun, but the real learning happens when they're sorting snack ingredients into categories or building cause-and-effect chain reactions with dominoes.

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Calin Baenen

I introduced coding to myself as a kid.

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Medea

same

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Andrew Baisden

Ditto!

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Calin Baenen

Wild or trainer? /J

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SchawnnahJ

same lol

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Yongchang He

That's true!

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Spandan Sehgal

Same

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Tawhid

haha, same

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Wj

same

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Ahmad1998dev

Great!

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Braydon Coyer

GameSalad was my introduction to programming over 10 years ago. I made several iOS games and published on the App Store. Super fun!

gamesalad.com/