Any tips on entry points for coding that you've found worked well or badly?
For example - a few years back I saw several young folk move over into coding by poking away at their MySpace pages to make them do "cool" things. For those people it seemed to be the same sort of starting point as the '10 PRINT "HELLO'; 20 GOTO 10;' type stuff did for mine.
I tried to aggregate those as a sub-thread. You make a great point with the MySpace example. Legos with built in robotics might be fun as well. I never had a lego (too expensive) and I only saw the $200 robotic kits in college in the US. In Chicago, a state organization is trying to create a programable robot with LED lights to get kids interested in coding and putting together simple hardware hacks. I think that is a great idea. I think a programmable robot kids can create and control with an iphone app would be great as well (paint-by-numbers hardware + software hacking).
It is true that the more we lower the threshold, the more people will dabble with hacking. It may or may not produce more great hackers in the short run, but in the long run it will create a shared literacy that puts hacking higher on the priority list for parents and kids 10 years down the line. You don't just share code, you share a value system when you teach that.
I'm interested that some of those seem more social than how I got into coding. I was the cliche fat-nerdy kid who spent many, many hours with the computer rather than interacting with humans ;-)
It's one of the things I noticed from the MySpace folk - they were very much more oriented towards sharing/showing their stuff with others.
The checklist I mention comes from conversations I've had with young girls in the US (seeing what resonates with them). I thing I would attribute the social stuff to a lesson I got from a KPCB guy at F8: Major startup innovation happens every 14 or so years because it takes that long for a new generation to grow up with the existing technology (today that's social) as second nature. Then (frequently) some tw/teen kid (Jobs/Gates, Zuckerberg) stepping on that invents the next big thing while tinkering. You can see that process evolving tech from hardware, to PC, to browser, to web, to social, to mobile.
For example - a few years back I saw several young folk move over into coding by poking away at their MySpace pages to make them do "cool" things. For those people it seemed to be the same sort of starting point as the '10 PRINT "HELLO'; 20 GOTO 10;' type stuff did for mine.