My son 12 year's old learn B4X

Hamied Abou Hulaikah

Well-Known Member
Licensed User
Longtime User
I planing to start learn my son B4X as one approach for all platform programming with one language.
I plan to learn him in spare time.
He love mobile programming in general.
I discuss with him the future of programming, the mobile world is the dominant.
So B4X is the best choice for him from my view, because I'm the teacher and I'm VB.net programmer.
He can take another way, but he'll face a difficulty in learning.
B4X is easy and fast to learn, it is updated daily & accommodate almost of changes in mobile world.
I hope 2 years later, he should be B4X expert.

Any suggestions
 

udg

Expert
Licensed User
Longtime User
This sounds like "the earlier he becomes a pro, the earlier I can retire"... smart plan, indeed :)

Seriously now. My suggestion is to approach programming by a practical point of view. If, for example, he is interested in games, plan to program a very simple game together. He will learn the basics along the way, remaining strongly committed to the final goal.
Youngsters seems to prefer videos to books, so they learn by imitation rather than reasoning based on acquired knowledge. IMHO that means they need a lot of hands-on experience to balance what elders learnt reading, experimenting and hacking.
Oh well, it's a new, fast pacing world..and they rule it.
 

RandomCoder

Well-Known Member
Licensed User
Longtime User
My two cents worth on teaching youngsters to program (and through experience tutoring apprentices at work), make it fun!
I remember once watching or reading an article about a father teaching his son to program. They hacked a remote controlled car and drove it using code. The kids soon got bored. But their interest was sparked when they realised that you could program the car to do a perfect drift. Then the fun commenced and they learnt all the more.
This is how I would try and approach it...
  • Make it fun!
  • Create lots of small apps...
    • A count down timer and label
    • Play a sound on the push of a button
    • Draw a line that follows your finger
    • Etc
  • Next create a game that uses all of the above.
The idea being that you can demonstrate that lots of little bits of code can soon be combined and reused to create a much bigger program relatively easily.
 

MarkusR

Well-Known Member
Licensed User
Longtime User
there are many topics to learn as programmer:
the ide
the ui designer
the language (also mainstream c#,asp.net,delphi,swift,java,html,java script,..)
structs & classes
collecting data, text, gps, images, sensors
process data
search data
visualize data, table, charts
file access
database access local & remote
usability
debugging
maths / calculations
input devices
playing sound/music
web api access
logic flowchart / mind maps
artificial intelligence / neural networks

the most fun & challenging is creating any kind of game.
 

inakigarm

Well-Known Member
Licensed User
Longtime User
I planing to start learn my son B4X as one approach for all platform programming with one language.
I plan to learn him in spare time.
He love mobile programming in general.
I discuss with him the future of programming, the mobile world is the dominant.
So B4X is the best choice for him from my view, because I'm the teacher and I'm VB.net programmer.
He can take another way, but he'll face a difficulty in learning.
B4X is easy and fast to learn, it is updated daily & accommodate almost of changes in mobile world.
I hope 2 years later, he should be B4X expert.

Any suggestions
I'm also begin to teach my son (15 years old) with B4X (on B4J platform first); he did some programming on Scratch and App Inventor before at School.
Maybe he won't be a programmer but it's a bonus on child education...
(examples of easy programs --> http://kio4.com/b4a/index.htm) in spanish
 
Top