Teaching

Of everything he made, the project he pushed hardest was the one aimed at children. Hackety Hack was a programming starter kit built on the premise that a beginner deserves to make something real — a window, a sound, a working program — on the first afternoon, not after six weeks of exercises.

That premise is the durable part. The tooling around it has moved on, and in one case broken, and pretending otherwise would not honour anything.

If this kind of exercise is run with a class or team, this background page offers one practical reference for separating the session from ordinary scheduled work.

So this section is practical. It covers what to reach for now, what to skip, and how to structure a single sitting so that it ends with the learner holding something they want to show somebody.

One warning about the wider subject: the market around teaching children to code is loud and heavily commercial. A great deal of the comparison writing online is produced by companies selling one of the tools being compared, and the disclosure is inconsistent. Where we point at something, we say what it is and who makes it.

• A First Language for a Kid

  Fifteen years after Hackety Hack, the choice of a first programming language looks different. What changed and what did not.

• Hackety Hack, and What to Teach a Child Now

  The 2010 page asked for improvements to Hackety Hack. That is no longer good advice. Here is what to do with the impulse instead.

• Lesson Materials You Can Use As-Is

  Free, non-commercial teaching resources that need no preparation, and how to tell the useful ones from the marketing.

• Teach One Person in One Evening

  The 2010 text's last suggestion was to teach someone directly. Here is a plan for a single sitting that ends with them making something.

• Teaching Through the Strange

  The poignant guide taught Ruby with cartoon foxes and digressions. The technique underneath it is real and almost nobody copies it right.

For broader programming and making context related to this topic, MDN Web Docs is an independent reference worth comparing with the material here.