Kahn Academy programming course

My younger son has spent a lot of time with Code.org and (to lesser extent) Scratch, and is now asking to try some of the same tricks in Unity "so he can type the code." (He's proud of his keyboarding skills and tired of dragging blocks around, I guess.)

So I've been thinking all week how best to get him started in Unity, in a way that won't be too great a leap from what he's used to. I have a couple of different half-baked Unity-based programming paradigms lying around, and was playing with these just today.

Then, a random web search led me to this:

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/programming​

(Yeah, my google-fu is so strong it finds what I need before I even realize I need it.)

If you care about programming education at all, drop what you're doing and go spend 10 minutes at this site. Seriously, it's amazing. There's a code area on the left, with immediate graphical results on the right. There are walk-you-through-it tutorials that talk to you, explaining things while they update the code for you. But at any point, you can pause that and change the code yourself!

I go through life generally feeling grumpy and disgruntled with any software I see, because it never lives up to what I imagine it ought to be. But this site blows me away. It's exactly what programming education ought to be.

So... the question relevant to this group is: how can we do something this awesome in Unity? Once students have exhausted how far they can take JavaScript in a web browser, how do we bring them into the great world of 3D, GameObjects, Transforms, and Input — in a way that leads them along as elegant as this?

 

Wow theres alot of content there, ill pass that to my loon.

I personally think the tutorial section and the live lectures on the learn page here are amazing, and they go from ground level. ive got my 13 yr old son involved, as he was learning scratch in school and ive nudged him this way.
and with the editor window on one side and the game window in another, as i was learning (still am) what i was doing was displayed in realtime which was gratifying

 

I've never checked out the programming lessons on Khan Academy so thanks for reminding me about that

The learn-to-program site I usually recommend is www.codecademy.com so check that one out too.

 

You can write scripts that compile while you're in play mode. You just need to ensure all and any references are self repairing, alternatively write editor scripts.