[quote=Blogstar]My oldest kid(12) is in OCD mode with the iPad and laptop. I have restricted his time and he has been sneaking on. My wife correctly wants to let him use it more this summer, but have it be guided into more constructive hours. Left to his own he will spend all day on games.
So she found “scratch”, anyone familiar with it? Any other self guided programs that have some merit? https://scratch.mit.edu/info/faq/
He also has his own Mind Storm robot, so we have been letting him find sites to work with that.[/quote]
Yes, actually I started to try to get my 9 year old using scratch… It’s not that easy for a 9 year old, but there’s plenty of exercises on it.
Also, supposedly, there are folks that run Scratch on a Raspberry Pi, and can use it to control hardware over GPIO, but I haven’t investigated much into that.
You or your wife or both might need to spend some time to figure stuff out yourself, but I think there are plenty of internet stuff available to guide you through it…
You can buy a raspberry pi from amazon. It will set you back about $30-50.
My kid has a hard time just “programming” without seeing/touching something physical, which is why I wanted to get get the hardware stuff working….(It’s on my todo list…)
The other thing I was thinking about was getting a programable drone. (Ok, maybe I’m just making an excuse for myself to get one one)
