Ask HN: How to best teach a group of children how to code?
I&#x27;ve done this for several years. Here&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve learned.<p>TLDR: Focus on getting them to have fun &amp; enjoy learning about &#x27;code&#x27;. Don&#x27;t care so much on how well they learn it.<p>Every kid is unique &amp; will respond to different things.<p>Social &amp; mentors are awesome. It&#x27;s usually more fun to build with others if possible. Also they will want to easily share &amp; show off their creations with others.<p>Show them how to &quot;hack&quot; Google with the browser&#x27;s dev inspector tools. Wins them over every time.<p>Give them simple partially completed programs that they can modify. I&#x27;ve had a lot of success with a simple trivia game that lets them start by modifying the questions&#x2F;answers &amp; the replies it gives. A great first lesson in how to use strings &amp; gets them looking at the code. They can then share what they created with others (social aspect) &amp; have them play their game.<p>Do NOT lecture to them or try to do long demos. They often listen to teachers lecture all day long. They want to have fun &amp; explore. They also don&#x27;t care about types or any other computer science terms until they&#x27;ve created a lot of things &amp; are trying to figure out why they don&#x27;t work.<p>I&#x27;ve had decent results with Scratch. For pure beginners though, still start them off with a semi-completed program.