Just over a year ago, my son Wyatt received his first computer for his sixth birthday. It’s a Raspberry Pi, and he has an old LCD monitor, and a kid-friendly mouse and keyboard. I purposely waited until he could read before starting to teach him about computers. He’s a pretty smart kid, reads a lot (a Harry Potter book in a weekend), and is somewhat socially awkward. Perfect for a programmer.

The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a cover on it. The first thing I did was teach him what each of the parts on the board is. This is the brain, this is the memory, this is where power comes in, etc. His very first task was to plug everything in. He had lots of fun trying to figure out where the HDMI cable goes, where the mouse and keyboard need to be plugged, etc. To this day, I teach him about debugging hardware issues by randomly unplugging cables when he’s not around.

Then we turned it on. He was very excited about LED lights coming to life.

Then we were greeted by a headless login screen. I made him a proper hacker handle, wjp, which he was very excited about, and I allowed him to select a password. Then, the computer was ready.

We started out by learning to use bash. You type in a command and hit “enter” to run it. We explored basic unix commands like ls, cd, echo, and date. Somewhat annoyingly, the hardest concept to explain to a child is what a file and a directory are. It tooks us a few tries over many days for the concept to really sink in.

I taught him to use nano to write simple text documents. He had fun writing down a list of all the superheroes he could think of, a list of countries, a list of his classmates, and so on. I installed cowsay which he loved.

I taught him how to use pipes. He thought it was hilarious to pipe his superhero list to cowsay. We also experimented with espeak.

Then, I installed and configured mutt for him. He has his own email address and can now communicate with his grandparents in Europe on his own. He still makes mistakes with the proper email syntax and etiquette but overall does email well. More than anything, it’s limited by his typing speed.

Wyatt also loves his XMPP client, profanity. The great thing is that most people that he wants to chat with have Google phones and can interact with him without having to install anything.

Annoyingly and most frustratingly, Wyatt has an iPad teacher this year at school. They do literally everything on iPads. Every single story he tells from school involves an iPad. He wants us to buy him an iPad. Many of the other parents are annoyed about this because it makes children less attentive, less creative, and much more easily bored. And I hate it because it messes up his head about Linux. No, child, ls is not an app, dammit. Shut up. But we make do.

Then one blessed day, I showed him the startx command to start the X window system. He was amazed at the colors and buttons, and everything. Then, we started exploring windows, menus, and of course Minecraft. Yes, kids and their Minecraft. He likes to draw in Tuxpain, play chess, tetris, and write books in Libreoffice.

A couple of weeks ago, I started teaching him basic programming with Python. He was very disappointed when he saw the kinds of programs I was going to teach him to write. He was under the impression that he was going to write a program that could turn a movie into a book. And instead, I suggested we start with “Hello world!” and leave AI for later.

We started with a simple “Hello world!”. We switched from nano to micro which is very similar and has syntax highlighting. Writing a Hello world program might seem dumb to experienced programmers but it’s great at showing the novice how to connect everything together: the file, the interpreter, the command to run the program, etc.

Then, we wrote a simple “Die toss” program. He was excited about it because it did something different each time, and not just say the same thing like the first program.

Yesterday, we wrote a simple quiz. This time, he wrote all the code by himself with my telling him how. Print a question and answers, use raw_input() to ask for the user’s selection, and then a simple if statement to determine if they were correct. It’s amazing how easy Python makes this.

answer = raw_input()

if answer is 'b':
    print 'You are correct'

It reads like English. He very quickly got the concept of if statements, and started writing more and more questions. Then, of course, every family member had to take the quiz.

Later that day, he told his mother that he wanted to be a programmer. He wants to write “apps”. His mother suggested that he can ask me to get him a job at Red Hat, or that he could work at Google. He scoffed at that and said he didn’t want to work on one project for a year like his Dad, and that, please, there are no computers or programmers at Google.