Claude Sonnet will ship in Xcode (developer.apple.com)

Have you had any experience teaching a 4 year old how to code? I'm thinking about not just typing but the mindset of automation and programming. My son is in a weekly class called Kiddie Coders and they are learning directions and how to put arrows together on a sheet of paper to get someone through a series of squares.

I was thinking of putting together activities at home so he can see how to tell instructions to someone who is blind, or follow instructions like a recipe (the favorite analogy to coding seems to be cooking)

Comments (8)

calgoo · 2h ago

My 5 year old is playing Minecraft and watching YouTube videos. He has now started asking about the automations, switches etc. so I'm teaching him the basics of coding, but in visual minecraft.when i asked about if and else the other day and referenced the switches he understood instantly what meant.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 · 4h ago

This article covers some things, I guess

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11109739/

It highlights https://www.scratchjr.org/

kamphey · 4h ago

this part seemed interesting:

  "The experimental cohort outperforms the control group with statistical significance in comprehending potent ideational constructs encompassing representation, algorithms, and hardware/software interplay. Conversely, the control group performs better in grasping the debugging concept than their experimental counterparts. "

But when I read further it's that the assessment had to do with a seesaw, which the control group had a literal seesaw they can use before and understand. While the experimental group was learning more abstract debugging.

So from this I think I'll use more in-person items and building literal things that have a problem, to teach debugging. Perhaps some kind of marble run. And discuss with him what he thinks will happen (the expectation) and the difference between that and what actually happens.

bombcar · 3h ago

I’d fire up Logo. The little drawing turtle.

kamphey · 3h ago

Is it this one? https://turtleacademy.com/lessons/1

sargstuff · 2h ago

Perhaps something along lines of setting up / planning robot/activity path? aka (noted in other postings) scratch junior[0]; mblock botly dash[1]; code & go

?? program robot to fetch/push food items to bowl.

----------------------------------

[0] : https://www.scratchjr.org/

[1] : https://blockly.games/puzzle

bediger4000 · 5h ago

There's a few episodes of the PBS show Cyber Chase you might want to watch with your kid.

There's a toy called Turing Tumble that might be good too.

kamphey · 4h ago

Thanks. Wow there's full episodes of Cyber Chase on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/@Cyberchase.Official

Turing Tumble looks a bit expensive, but might make a good birthday gift.

Claude Sonnet will ship in Xcode (developer.apple.com)

Strange CW Keys (sites.google.com)

Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

A deep dive into Debian 13 /tmp: What's new, and what to do if you don't like it (lowendbox.com)

Some thoughts on LLMs and software development (martinfowler.com)

Fuck up my site – Turn any website into beautiful chaos (fuckupmysite.com)

My startup banking story (2023) (mitchellh.com)

Uncertain<T> (nshipster.com)

AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study (cnbc.com)

Python: The Documentary [video] (youtube.com)

Thrashing (exple.tive.org)

Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie (lwn.net)

Launch HN: Dedalus Labs (YC S25) – Vercel for Agents

Expert: LSP for Elixir (github.com)

Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference? (martinalderson.com)

Sometimes CPU cores are odd (anubis.techaro.lol)

Rupert's Property (johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com)

Building your own CLI coding agent with Pydantic-AI (martinfowler.com)

RSS is awesome (evanverma.com)

AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore (praf.me)

In Search of AI Psychosis (astralcodexten.com)

Dependent Types: Universes, or types of types (jonmsterling.com)

Ask HN: What to Learn for Math for Modeling?

TuneD is a system tuning service for Linux (tuned-project.org)

There Goes the American Muscle Car (thedispatch.com)

You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome (lyra.horse)

A forgotten medieval fruit with a vulgar name (2021) (bbc.com)

What We Find in the Sewers (asimov.press)

The King's Quarry: How Louis XVI Went from Hunter to Hunted (worldhistory.substack.com)

Will AI Replace Human Thinking? The Case for Writing and Coding Manually (ssp.sh)

The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019) (mcdreeamiemusings.com)

VLT observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS II (arxiv.org)

Microbial metabolite repairs liver injury by restoring hepatic lipid metabolism (journals.asm.org)

Show HN: SwiftAI – open-source library to easily build LLM features on iOS/macOS (github.com)

Prosper AI (YC S23) Is Hiring Founding Account Executives (NYC) (jobs.ashbyhq.com)

Speed-coding for the 6502 – a simple example (colino.net)

That boolean should probably be something else (ntietz.com)

Open Source is one person (opensourcesecurity.io)

Charting Form Ds to roughly see the state of venture capital “fund” raising (tj401.com)

RFC 8594: The Sunset HTTP Header Field (2019) (datatracker.ietf.org)

Optimising for maintainability – Gleam in production at Strand (gleam.run)

Group Borrowing: Zero-cost memory safety with fewer restrictions (verdagon.dev)

Claude Code Checkpoints (claude-checkpoints.com)

The sisters “paradox” – counter-intuitive probability (blog.engora.com)

I've always wanted to be an open-source maintainer- now I regret it (joaomagfreitas.link)

GPU Prefix Sums: A nearly complete collection (github.com)

Important machine learning equations (chizkidd.github.io)

Kagi Is Down (status.kagi.com)

Rendering a game in real time with AI (blog.jeffschomay.com)

Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough (2023) (xeiaso.net)

Ask HN: How to teach a 4 year old to code?

Comments (8)