Teaching my kiddos how to program!

I have decided that both my kids, 8 (girl) & 11 (boy) are ready to learn how to program. Not with Scratch or some other "building blocks" interface, rather, authentic programming. I will start with  Python as it has far fewer syntactical symbols to deal with and it is dynamic and will introduce GUIs very early on so that sound, images, animation can be incorporated. I will be using Python 2+, Pyglet and Tkinter. I will install Python, Pyglet and Tkinter onto their lap tops. We will be using Geany as our interpreter. This weekend will be our first lesson together. Fun fun!!!

Day 1: Taught my kids how to create/save a python file using Geany. Introduced print and how to use it to print strings and string variables. Introduced the concept of variables and concatenation. Also introduced the raw_input and response. 

print 'name'

name='isabella'
print name

answer=raw_input('what is your name? ')
print 'Your name is '+answer+'.'

My eight year old daughter was a little more enthusiastic than my 11 year old son. :-) In fact, my daughter wanted me to spend a little more time helping her with a simple guessing game using if, else statements. Both picked it up quickly.