I thought my 10y.o. daughter might want to learn programming. So I pointed her to codecademy and said if she got stuck, to call me over.
She was excited to try, but ran into the exact same problems this article surfaced. She was being a real trouper about it, but it was plain that her patience and temper were running short. That said, once we got past the first steps and I taught her how the website was supposed to work, she breezed through the next handful of exercises before calling it a night.
All that said, I was definitely left with the impression that codecademy was not well designed for complete beginners. Yet.
For now I had a brief look at Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) and I'm tempted to turn her loose on that. It seems to have a nicer effort/reward slope, and will help her understand enough of the core ideas behind programming that I could then turn her loose on other languages.
I highly recommend Scratch. I teach 8 - 12 year olds using scratch. It teaches computational concepts in a fun (certainly not intimidating way). I am now planning to experiment using Scratch for adults as well as a starting point before introducing any of the common programming languages.
She was excited to try, but ran into the exact same problems this article surfaced. She was being a real trouper about it, but it was plain that her patience and temper were running short. That said, once we got past the first steps and I taught her how the website was supposed to work, she breezed through the next handful of exercises before calling it a night.
All that said, I was definitely left with the impression that codecademy was not well designed for complete beginners. Yet.
For now I had a brief look at Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) and I'm tempted to turn her loose on that. It seems to have a nicer effort/reward slope, and will help her understand enough of the core ideas behind programming that I could then turn her loose on other languages.