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Whats a good age to get your children into programming?
I have a very smart son of 6 years old. I wonder whether is that a good age to start teaching him programming? Are there any literature and/or sources on the web about doing so? What language should my kid start with (Functional Programming like Scala/LISP, Object-Oriented one like Java)?
I don't know if you want to "teach" programming as much as expose your son. :) He's young, so maybe he'll like it, but maybe he won't.
If you do want to, though, a great place to start is the Alice project. It's designed pretty much for this specific purpose. It provides an interactive world that your child can easily write software for in a java-y way. It provides a way for your son to tell stories via code, and that's something that every child I've ever met has loved doing. (Tell stories, I mean, not write code. :) )
Its probably worth getting him excited about the end-goal, eg a website, rather than than the means to get there, then the rest should come naturally, it will be up to him where, how or if he progreses on from that.
I guess he should first study mathematics and then go into programming
There's c# for sharp kids, and the article of the link recommend starting at 10 years or higher. But you could give it a try a little earlier if he's that smart...
I've been thinking about this too (our eldest son is 5). I would be tempted to start with Logo (and indeed that's what I started with). It has instant feedback and gets some of the ideas of programming without too much other stuff getting in the way.
There are also various education-inspired languages you might want to check out - I believe Squeak was originally meant for kids, for example. I wouldn't personally start off with mainstream languages such as Java/C#/Scala etc though - there's a lot of stuff which gets in the way of the whole "instant gratification" part. I'm pretty sure my son at least would get bored with just text fairly quickly...
In terms of books, you might want to check out Hello World! which is specifically aimed at kids. (I must read my review copy some time... a colleague recommends it though :)
Teaching him a functional programming language like Haskell would be very good especially if he excels in Maths.
Usually, I would recommend Visual Basic to new programmers. However, programmers who have VB (VB6 not .NET) as their first language tend to (NOT ALWAYS) write sloppier code than those with Java or c# as their first langauge, insofar what I have witnessed.
I was about 8 when I first picked up a BASIC book and wrote this on my Commodore 64:
10 PRINT "Dean is a dork"
20 GOTO 10
Dean is, of course, the name of my younger brother. From there I just kept adding stuff to see what I could do. By 14 I had a 2D spaceship game with support for two joysticks, sound, multicolored sprites, and collision detection.
Buy him and Xbox360 and get Kudo from the IndieGames Channel. Or give him Lego Mindstorms (has a nice GUI to create simple programs with). Another idea is the RPG Maker Series - this got me on fire (but again, you really need to be able to read).
However, 9 seems to be a more reasonable age for this. And I wouldn't even try to go with real programming languages.
If he's interested he's old enough. Small Basic has been designed to be a modern introductory language.
My first programming language was COMAL, which was created in part for teaching purposes. I think I was about eight years old.
Today, I guess as a language I would recommend Python. It has very little overhead before you can actually do stuff, and you don't have to stick to a certain programming paradigm. A "hello world" is a no-brainer, and you can go to all possible directions from there.
Funny, I was looking at this myself. Take a look at this:
http://devlicio.us/blogs/billy%5Fmccafferty/archive/2009/09/01/programming-for-kids.aspx
I found the Kids explaining Python interesting to watch (German spoken, english translation). Don't know exactly how old they are but they seem to have fun with it and it may be a good start to get someone the same age into it (well as a good parent you would never force you child into it - no matter how smart he might happen to be).
I like the idea of modelling4all, which is a website that allows to define behaviors of ants (or other 'agents') and then simulate those ants, share behaviors with other users etc. See if this is fun for him, but don't push too hard.
I think its most likely too early to introduce programming, per se. Just think of all the people who pressured their kids to study the violin only to have the kid hate it (and them) by the time they can appreciate such a skill.
It may work better if you start by encouraging him to ask lots of questions about how things work in the world around him. Get him used to trouble shooting and working out complex or abstract ideas on his own. Establish the basics of trial and error hypothesis testing.
Then when he is a bit older you can see if he enjoys bringing those skills to programming.
Posted my comment as an answer.
Let him be a kid. I wouldn't bother teaching him such a focused skill at this age. Teaching him to critically think via normal life experiences would be my goal. Let him remain a child for as long as he can. Let the boy play! :) If he was 12 or so and asking that would be a little different in my book.