Hi all,
A fair while ago I asked the community here advice as my 8yo lad wanted to experiment with programming: Old Post.
Thanks so much for all the words of wisdom - there’s still stuff we can explore in the replies.
Thought I’d just give a little update.
So I installed dual boot Linux Mint / OSX on an old intel MacBook Air (dual boot in case his homework/school stuff needs it, but he hasn’t used OSX much!).
It was much easier than I thought it’d be. Perhaps it’s just the hardware/OS choice, but I don’t consider myself to be ‘properly’ technical and it was a breeze. Perhaps the only difficult part was creating a bootable OSX restore disk just in case I destroyed the OS… it’s almost like Mac really don’t want you to be doing this.
He’s working his way through foundational courses on programming, in codeacademy, and using scratch as usual. So far, so good.
Is there an IDE you’d recommend that has some element of a tutorial to it?
Your Mac has “recovery mode” in the firmware, it will often boot into recovery automatically if there’s something wrong with your boot disk
Oh really? Agh I just assumed incorrectly then. Thanks.
Thanks for the ‘more realistic’ intro to dev. I will be showing him CLI. And I think these are good steps. First though I want to give him the opportunity to learn the ‘thinking/design/problem-solving’ element of programming.
Great suggestions. I’m tempted to get a Chat GPT sub myself.
