Tuxpaint-Android VS scratch-www

PBS Kids has a lot of games and activities on their website:

https://pbskids.org/games

If your kids watch any PBS shows them they'll recognize the characters.

The activities were fun enough for our twins to learn how to use computer mice at age 3.

Tux Paint is also really fun for young kids and a good way to learn mouse usage:

https://tuxpaint.org/

Tux Paint (version 0.9.30): A drawing program for children.

I can also recommend https://tuxpaint.org/. I see they also have an app for Android nowadays, but no iOS it seems.

TuxPaint

This is going to depend on the age of the kid. I have given a cheap Laptop to my 6-year old and introduced her to Scratch[1] and Tuxpaint[2]. I let her use the mouse and keyboard more instead of tapping on a screen. The school is likely to introduce Scratch from next year. For older kids, they should be on a normal computer. My old MacBook Pro came handy for the elder one. She does the usual Python, games and stuff but she is not really interested in the computer aspect of computers.

The one thing I want to make them learn is to touch-type but it is hard to convince them to do it regularly. Some of the collections about Computer education for kids https://notes.oinam.com/education/computer/

1. https://scratch.mit.edu

2. https://tuxpaint.org

Tux Paint is available for download, free of charge, from the project's website: https://tuxpaint.org/. Tux Paint is open source software and does not contain in-app advertising.

and https://codecombat.com, which has been around for a while now.

I think this paradigm (navigating a character using "move" function invocations) is good but kind of exhausts its usefulness after a while. I question whether my daughter learns coding this way or just is playing a turn based top down platformer. The most code like thing is when you use 'loops' to have characters repeat sequences of moves. I think when kids grok these things these apps become just types of glofiried education flavoured video games. There are a lot of things in kodable for instance that I feel are just basic web games with coding terms slapped on it.

https://scratch.mit.edu/ is more like 'programming' imo, even at the level of the objective -- having a blank canvas to create something. It seems a little advanced for my kids right now though.

+1 Scratch! My son started with it, then expanded into Roblox/Lua.

Children can download other people's games and experiment there. Scratch also has pre-made art, sounds, music.

https://scratch.mit.edu/

Scratch.mit.edu is a highly-recommended place to start [1] https://scratch.mit.edu/

> Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations. Scratch is designed, developed, and moderated by the Scratch Foundation, a nonprofit organization. [2]

1: https://scratch.mit.edu/

https://scratch.mit.edu/ (Scratch version 2)

Someone who uses scratch.mit.edu (like me)

Now that I think of it, I did start game development on scratch before going right into java (because of minecraft).

I'm looking for the best systems to help a 4/5 year old get the basics of programming. My daughter has shown interest in what I do, and loves puzzles and building things. Looking for something visual and fun that can start her down the path of logic and creating with computers.

I have a passing familiarity with Scratch [1], which I'm now looking into more, but am hoping others can share their knowledge and experience in this area.

[1] https://scratch.mit.edu/