Gödel, Escher, Bach for 11 year olds.
December 3, 2014 3:48 PM   Subscribe

I have a beloved 11 year old nephew who loves programming in Scratch and loves Minecraft. And when he describes his Scratch programs to me, he's got a fairly shallow understanding of what a program is, so he'll describe it as a bunch of instructions.

I'd like him to have something that gives him a real feel of how complex a logical system could be. Basically an introduction to recursion that's fun and engaging, but not 1100 pages like Gödel, Escher, Bach or Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter. I've come across Raymond Smullyan as someone whose written things like this, so titles by him are welcome, but I'd like to find some new authors as well.
posted by ambrosen to Science & Nature (10 answers total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
Lauren Ipsum is a somewhat whimsical intro to computer science ideas for kids.

Conrad Barski wrote some books that teach Lisp concepts and practice through games and comics, though I'm not sure they'll be accessible to an 11-year-old without a lot of hand-holding or prior programming experience.

Computer Science Unplugged has a bunch of resources.

Aside from books, I think the real way he'll learn this stuff is by expanding his hands-on work beyond Scratch to programming environments with subroutines and recursion. LOGO would be a great next step, but maybe he'd be more motivated to jump into something like Minecraft modding even though it's harder to learn. There's also computer programming at Khan Academy.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:29 PM on December 3, 2014 [1 favorite]


Based on the title I was going to recommend Metamagical Themas :-P It's a thick book but it's basically a collection of stand-alone articles, so you can approach it one chunk at a time. 11 might be a bit young but if he's already programming in Scratch maybe not.
posted by Nelson at 4:46 PM on December 3, 2014


At his age I was obsessed with Martin Gardner's Aha! books -- kind of in the vein of Smullyan's stuff but I prefer Gardner! There are cartoons and stories, which is fun, but the math is solid too.
posted by anotherthink at 5:01 PM on December 3, 2014


Give him Gödel Escher Bach and suggest only reading the dialogues. (Worked for me.)

Or (I mean "and"), get him a comprehensive C++ tutorial book. If he's interested, no reason to deny him the real stuff just because he's young. (Wish I'd gotten a real physics textbook when I wanted to learn about relativity at around that age.)

Also, in a few years don't discourage him from seeking mature non-religious perspectives on relationships/romance to explain the theory surrounding obvious and painful dating mistakes, and make sure his college GPA stays above ~3.6 so he can go to a decent grad school.
posted by sninctown at 5:19 PM on December 3, 2014 [3 favorites]


There are some fun section in Snow Crash that are light and explain some computer stuff, though I'm not sure I would hand a copy of Snow Crash to an 11 year old.
posted by gregr at 6:46 PM on December 3, 2014 [1 favorite]


It's pricey, but supposedly Kano offers "A computer and coding kit for all ages, all over the world. Simple as Lego, powered by Pi. Make games, learn code, create the future."
posted by MansRiot at 7:59 PM on December 3, 2014


I wouldn't go with the Kano; we have one, and it's a very underpowered computer. Our kid loves the idea of having his own computer, but he gets on a machine with a faster processor any chance he gets. If he's doing Minecraft and Scratch on other systems, he'll be frustrated by the slow pace on the Kano. We often think the Kano has frozen, but it's just...that...slow.

We've done part of the Computer Science Unplugged curriculum and really liked it.

It doesn't take much to get into things that are more complex than a set of instructions with something like an Arduino. My 13-year-old has the Arduino starter kit , and you start getting into loops and nested loops and if-then statements while still doing some fairly simple electronics projects. Not a book, but a cool thing nonetheless.
posted by not that girl at 9:15 PM on December 3, 2014


I don't know how old I was when I read it as a kid, but I remember Danny Hillis's The Pattern On the Stone being quite good.
posted by Wemmick at 12:00 AM on December 4, 2014


At 12 years old, I was reading the Stroustrup book, having learnt Logo Writer (kind of a rough 80s equivalent to Scratch) and Perl (to do CGI in the new WWW, natch).

While I wouldn't necessarily recommend that path, I think a "proper" programming environment is worth considering. I really like the Beaglebone Black, which ships with something called Bonescript, a really clever Javascript-based library. Paired with something like this extensive book about the BBB1 and a book focussed on Javascript, I think you might have a winner.

1 Which goes far beyond just JS, but includes a section on Bonescript too
posted by TheNewWazoo at 9:15 PM on December 4, 2014


(on reviewing the comments for the "Bad to the Bone" book, perhaps choose something different...)
posted by TheNewWazoo at 9:16 PM on December 4, 2014


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