I’ll bet when you hear the word python, you think of the snake instead of classical education, right?  Well, now I will always associate python with my son’s first programming experience.  Who doesn’t have at least one high school son who shows some interest in video games?  My 16 year old son, Connor, has been an aficionado for years, and recently as part of our own post-trivium strategic planning, we decided to let him tackle computer programming.  Using this simple text, he learned his first computer language, and as a result, he also earned a full high school credit in technology for the homeschool transcript.  This adventure was his first real plunge into supervised independent study.  Here’s his book review:

Hello World!  Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners, by Warren and Carter Sande, is the book to go to for an easy jump into programming! It focuses on the language Python, which is definitely not the easiest language out there, but Hello World makes the hard stuff simple and simple stuff simpler. It has had a major effect in how I view programming, and I’m looking forward to learning other languages because of this book.

In essence, “Hello World!” is a book about the basics in programming. It starts off with something easy to understand, and gradually pushes you farther into the deeper and more complex parts of the language. The book is paced very well, and it never left me feeling overwhelmed. Throughout “Hello World” you will find boxes that contain programming lines. These are the exercise boxes, and you have to write out this code, and then check it for typos! This part of the book may seem slightly strenuous in the beginning, but over time you actually start to understand what the language is telling the computer to do, which is a great feeling. These code boxes follow the pattern of the book, starting out small with simple math equations, and ending strong with actual games like Pong.

I only had two complaints with this book: Sometimes the code displayed errors I didn’t know how to fix, and other times I just felt like I was writing out code, not understanding what it was saying. When the code had problems that I hadn’t learned about yet, I couldn’t solve for them, therefore not being able to see my final project (in one of the chapters). These two problems only happened a couple times though, and aren’t a consistent theme.

So, should you buy it, borrow it, or burn it? Buy it!  This is a must buy, it’s simple, easy and satisfying. I didn’t know a thing about programming before, but this book showed me a glimpse of what programming can accomplish.

So just to give you an idea of how we did this, Hello World! has 25 chapters, so he completed one chapter a week.  When you purchase the text, you’ll get the python software download link which he will install as part of his assignment in the first chapter.  I hope you found this homeschool teaching resource helpful, and if you have any questions, just leave a comment below so that I can give it to Connor.