[TriLUG] How young is too young for linux-ish training?

[Michael Peters]

On 08/30/2011 10:33 PM, Paul G. Szabady wrote:

> My 7 year-old grandson has been asking me for close to a year to teach
> him to build a website. Not knowing how to go about teaching someone
> that young, I finally just put up a site for him. He loved it for about
> a week, then started asking me to show him how to make changes. I would
> love to begin teaching him some basic html or maybe even some basic
> programming, but I'm stumped.

If he's interested in learning how to build a web site, then start from 
there. Give him a book on HTML (HTML for Dummies is a really good intro 
for non-programmers about HTML and markup languages in general).

If he wants to learn more after that I'd go with Javascript. He already 
has a runtime in his browser and he can immediately see results and 
changes just by hitting reload. Javascript has it's warts, but most of 
it is pretty simple and would serve as a good introduction to other 
languages with similar syntax and concepts like C, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.

-- 
Michael Peters
Plus Three, LP