How would you introduce kotlin to children? I’m lo...

# getting-started

[Nathan Fallet]

How would you introduce kotlin to children? I’m looking for a fun way so they enjoy the process (I know a lot of them are used to games with high quality graphics so they could find console applications boring). Maybe there are softwares to learn the language based on some game (you program characters behavior or something), I know that exists for other languages but not sure for Kotlin 🤷‍♂️ Let me know if you have ideas 😄

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

I'd recommend Kotlin notebooks, first of all, to simplify the setup they need.
Turtle is probably a classic in this field! I tried looking before, but couldn't find many notebooks-compatible turtle libraries.

[PHondogo]

I've written several simple games with my 11 years old son. Canvas based like tanks, cars, balls. And several using Compose elements like memo, monopoly.

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

Compose might be rather fun too! I'd worry, though, that it's difficult to explain the magic behind it if they wanted to delve deeper.

[alex j]

i'd reccomend vibecoding a front-end. some simple but engaging GUI shouldnt be hard to wire up. it could be anything 🙂


pedagogically a child is gonna be much more connected to the code it writes. possibly auto-refresh so the changes appear automatically, otherwise the kid can figure it out

[Nathan Fallet]

I've been looking on my side too, and I think I’ll develop some frontend to allow writing some kotlin code to control characters in Minecraft. This is a game children already like and kotlin can already do a lot in it.

[alex j]

Sounds awesome! Yeah minecraft mods in kotlin is great.