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General Discussion

Best way to introduce a Teenager to Coding.

I would like to have my Teenagers try coding. I would like to know what the best track/language would be to get them exposed to see how they like it.

The course would need to be simple starting from the basics and be rewarding to they can see they made something early in the endeavor otherwise they might think whats the point and want to give up.

Simon Coates
Simon Coates
28,694 Points

there is a digital literacy track, that includes trivial introductions to CSS, javascript and html. Python is often selected as a first programming language. (some of the tracks are complex or require that you learn a language and use a separate language for UI. The early Python courses I think let you program and just output to the screen. It bypasses a barrier of some languages of needing to also know http/html/css/javascript.)

Abraham Juliot
Abraham Juliot
47,353 Points

Also, supplement Treehouse with some of the free material courses at codeschool and freecodecamp

3 Answers

Brian Jensen
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STAFF
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Brian Jensen
Treehouse Staff

This book: JavaScript For Kids is a very fun way to learn programming!

It has hilarious projects, like this random insult generator:

var randomBodyParts = ["Face", "Nose", "Hair"];
var randomAdjectives = ["Smelly", "Boring", "Stupid"];
var randomWords = ["Fly", "Marmot", "Stick", "Monkey", "Rat"];

// Pick a random body part from the randomBodyParts array:
var randomBodyPart = randomBodyParts[Math.floor(Math.random() * 3)];
// Pick a random adjective from the randomAdjectives array:
var randomAdjective = randomAdjectives[Math.floor(Math.random() * 3)];
// Pick a random word from the randomWords array:
var randomWord = randomWords[Math.floor(Math.random() * 5)];
// Join all the random strings into a sentence:
var randomInsult = "Your " + randomBodyPart + " is like a " + randomAdjective + " " + randomWord + "!!!";

randomInsult;

What courses on TreeHouse would you recommend? I would like to use this site to get them started.

Bryn Price
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Bryn Price
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 7,253 Points

What about Python? From what I understand, it's a good language for beginners. Although I've not yet done them, it might be worth looking at the Python track.

When I was a teenager wanting to code we lacked stuff like Team treehouse, but I started with something quite simple, which was Dark Basic. Looking at Python it looks quite straight forward to use and maybe useful to ease into more complicated languages.

Brian Jensen
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STAFF
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Brian Jensen
Treehouse Staff

This Treehouse Club - MASH is a fun little course you can use to gauge their interests. They don't need prior knowledge of CSS, HTML, or JavaScript it goes over every line of code.