Now that your kids have a new computer, teach them how to program in Ruby

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You've got to start them young, right? With kids pick­ing up on how to use a com­put­er faster than ever before, why not teach them how to pro­gram too?

Kids Ruby is a piece of soft­ware and set of tuto­ri­als that teach­es kids the art of devel­op­ment, with Ruby as its pro­gram­ming lan­guage of choice. For­get sci­ence fairs, your son or daugh­ter could be the next Mark Zucker­berg.

The soft­ware is avail­able for Mac or PC, or if you're feel­ing real­ly adven­tur­ous, you can install the Kid­sRu­by OS, which is built on Ubun­tu. Now that's a cool week­end project, espe­cial­ly if you've pur­chased a new house­hold com­put­er for Christ­mas.

Teach your kids how to pro­gram

The Kid­sRu­by site speaks about pro­gram­ming in a way that kids can under­stand. It often sug­gests that chil­dren "hack" their home­work:

When we say "hack your home­work" we mean "learn how to write a com­put­er pro­gram to help you with your home­work". For exam­ple, writ­ing code to solve a par­tic­u­lar math prob­lem. By show­ing kids that pro­gram­ming can apply to the real world, like any sub­ject, it becomes a lot more inter­est­ing to learn about.

The term "hack" in the com­put­er world, means to be able to do some­thing with hard­ware or soft­ware that the orig­i­nal design­ers did not real­ize could be done, usu­al­ly in a good way. This term is often con­fused with the term "crack" which means to bypass secu­ri­ty of some kind, usu­al­ly con­sid­ered some­thing bad that you do not wish to do.

How adorable is that? Soon, your kids will be run­ning around the house look­ing for things to auto­mate. They might even come up with the next big thing, you never know.

With the Kid­sRu­by edi­tor and cur­ricu­lum, chil­dren can jump right in and start cre­at­ing sim­ple pro­grams in Ruby:

KIDSRUBY-HELP

KIDSRUBY-OSX

With all of the code for KidRu­by sit­ting on GitHub, peo­ple are start­ing to col­lab­o­rate on it and make more cur­ricu­lums for your bud­ding rock star devel­op­er. The site even announced a new learn­ing game for pro­gram­ming called "Ruby­War­rior", which is also avail­able on GitHub. By learn­ing com­mands in Ruby, you have to nav­i­gate your war­rior up a set of stairs to beat the game.........

Now that your kids have a new computer, teach them how to program in Ruby
http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/12/26/now-that-your-kids-have-a-new-computer-teach-them-how-to-program-in-ruby/