I was just wondering what’s a good age to start leaning. My son turns 8 on Friday and has shown some interest in it when he sees me on the computer. He’s smart and wants to grow up to be a engineer in the navy but till then I thought he could have fun with this. When is a good age and a place to start?
Now.
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If he’s interested, start him now. My kids have played around with googles hour of code stuff, and they are younger.
Don’t try and force kids to do any particular field of study, except for the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic. But at the same time, let them experiment with whatever catches their interest.
I know some people start doing rudiment at 4, but it seems 6 is where they are able to pick up most basic concept. SO now is great, I think you can even find youtube video of kids doing advance things on youtube.
at 1:00
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The earlier the better. Start right away. Coding is an extremely important life skill.
10 to 13 years old is good. While earlier is better, A 6 y/o kid would lack some of the mental constructs necessary for higher tier stuff. Still, starting VERY early will a chance of them becoming crazy good at something.
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This is one that I think is up for debate. Understanding how computers work in general is important. Pretty much every professional uses computers for everything every day. That’s only going to get more prevalent in the immediate future.
On the other hand we are starting to see the trend to needing less coding in general. Tools like Unity reduce the need to program to make a game. Excel and the like have reduced the need to be able to code to handle large amounts of data. There are website generation tools that now mean you don’t need to code to write up your own website. And so on.
Coding will still be a valuable specialist skill for a long time. But I struggle to see it as an important life skill.
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Some people say the “true value of coding” is the ability to take large and complex problems and break them up into small pieces. Take things that are vague, difficult to wrap your mind around and putting them into a concrete sequential steps.
These kind of abilities might help in other areas than writing program code as well.
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But I call this engineering. My wife calls it graphics design.
I agree that breaking down problems is a skill. But its in no way exclusive to coding. Its been taught and used in most disciplines for centuries.
Reading is an extremely important life skill. Writing, arithmetic, word processing and finding information on the internet are all extremely important life skills. I just don’t buy that writing code belongs in the same category.
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Probably any time is fine, I messed around with a Commodore 64 as a kid. Only thing, Unity probably isn’t the best choice for this. Check out some of the simpler visual coding apps made for kids like Scratch.
I started at 14.
Somehow I managed to squeze it between random farmwork.
That was me as well, but only really did print and goto mostly.
Thanks all for your help. I think let him try the roll a ball tutorial and see how that goes. If it works out then great. If not I’ll try game maker or that scratch thing.
The earlier the better, the language areas of the brain are more flexible in young kids, and what they are learning is after all a programming language.
Unity might be a little too complex though, and I’d say stick to 2D at first. My recommendation would be anything where you can write python.
I myself started with basic on the C64 at 7, AMOS basic on the Amiga around 10 and assembler programming on the Amiga around 12, but didn’t really get a grasp of 3D graphics before around 14. I think this is a reasonable overview of the complexity you could expect an average child to manage, as I’m pretty average myself.
Ease them in wih flowchart stuff like Raptor, (better stuff exists now, probably, but that’s where I started)
Slowly push them to python. (I actually had Java at this point but w/e)
And them they should be ready to slowly walk the plank of c-likes.
If you want to focus on programming alone, Untiy comes much later.
I’m not sure what everybody in this thread is calling “programming”, but for the real stuff, everything I did before 17 was nearly useless : I started at 10 with Basic (mostly copying programs from books 
), then Logo at school at 12 (visual geometry programming), then Basic doing my own little programs at 14, then actually moved to C and started real coding stuff at 17, and it took me a bit more than 1 year to be up to speed with the demoscene coding and 2 years and half to release my 1st successful game… (and this was before Internet, I had to create my own drawing software as I couldn’t find the specs of the image formats :p)
Now, I live from my coding skills as an Indie Dev (amongst the other needed skills an Indie Dev must have).
But yup, like @Kiwasi said, there’s not much harm to let them explore stuff that catches their interest, as long as they don’t start coding all night long… 
However, I think they have other more important & more useful things to do while they are still children…
Or in other words : coding is easy, you don’t need to start at 5 to be great at 25. Running, playing inside & outside, making friends are good goals when you’re a child. And you’ll have all your life afterward to be a Nerd… 
And if you want intellectual training & stimulation, then Chess, Go, strategy games, Maths & Physics will be a better formation at what is required to be a good coder afterwards.
My 2cts…
Reflecting on my own childhood, I was ready to start playing with some programming concepts at 7 years of age, but in reality it didnt work out like that (had no computer till a few years after that age) and so I started later, and only very sporadically (more reading than actually doing) until I was into my mid teens.
For the record playing outside and being a Nerd are not mutually exclusive. #badfantasy.
I was about 10 when I started learning. I think I could have handled it before that. You definitely need to be able to read well, and do some basic logic. But there’s no reason that it can’t help them learn those things, too.
Tools have made it easy to do certain things without coding skills, but future projects will build on top of those things using coding skills. With tools like Unity, there is less need for game engine coding, yet there is still a lot of need for coding every other aspect of a game. Programmers are no less busy today thanks to Unity. If anything, programmers have just as much work to do, but they get to do things that create a more amazing experience for users instead of just the tedious game engine constructions tasks.
And outside of game development, there are still lots of uses for coding. Regardless of what career path a child chooses, coding skills can give that child an advantage in that career. Tools like Excel do make some tasks easier. However, being able to parse data using coding skills gives a person an advantage over somebody who can only sort that data using Excel.
If they can read and write, they can code. If they are expressing an interest in it, all the better. It’s fine to ease them into it slowly, you don’t want to overwhelm them. But the earlier you can get involved in this stuff, the easier it will be for your brain to absorb it. And in our modern tech-centric world, having a stronger understanding of such concepts is a huge advantage.
It takes a long time to master these skills. Time and practice at a young age is great. I don’t think you should pressure them. But I do think you should be open and encouraging, and help them with any problems or questions they bring to you. It’s a fantastic learning opportunity.