If you have a moment, check out the blog posts here: http://pychildren.blogspot.com... This section conveys the simple joy of living and learning and how we often fail as adults by teaching our children that things are impossible. Somewhere along our path to adulthood, we stop believing in magic. What would make us start believing again? It seems improbable for a 9 year old girl to program. Yet, I see it. As she sits in front of a Linux computer slowly typing out code in PyCharm, I think that this tiny 3rd grade girl either represents the future of computer programming or a failed opportunity for everyone. Adjust the y axis to move the character down the screen with keyboard input, I say. I do not expect her to succeed. She does it with the aid of PyCharm's fantastic code completion, happily typing in: if event.key == pygame.K_DOWN: y = y + 1 There's a moment of magic. I imagine every girl in America, daintily typing out our future. In her face, I see the things that adults would pay a fortune to capture, wonderment, belief, excitement in the aha instant of understanding. The gears click in her head, she presses the Run button on PyCharm, a Pygame window starts up with a pink girl character in the center of the screen. Then, the 3rd grade girl coder presses the down arrow key on her Logitech keyboard. And, the girl on the screen moves down. She talks about Barbie, My Little Pony, Hello Kitty, and Ada Lovelace, creator of the world's first computer algorithm. She knows about Ada Lovelace's work on the Babbage Analytical Engine, because girls talk in 3rd grade, letting the boys know that the world's first computer programmer was female. I hope that their girl power feeling of superiority continues on through high school.

I have researched this subject extensively over the last several years. Most importantly, I have exposure to children between ages 6 and 14 that can program successfully with a text editor or IDE. The short answer is go straight to Python. You can read about my personal experience with my own children here: http://pychildren.blogspot.com... The main child is now 10 and using Python with IDLE and PyCharm. Also suggest you research this site: http://www.learningtech.org/wo... which I also have experience with by sending my own kid to the class. Note the Minecraft plugins from grade 4. Definitely wish I had started my eldest kid earlier as I think that age 8 would have been fine. There's a kid in my daughter's class that is 6 years old and completely killing it with PyGame. I think that I'm going to drop down from PyGame to Python Turtle (logo) with my daughter for a while. Good luck. Feel free to send me a note with your progress. I love hearing from parents with children under age 14 that are using text editors or IDEs.