Python for 11 year old

[Ban Bot]

My son is learning Python on CodeAcademy and really enjoying it.

He has asked about writing/saving his own code outside of their walled garden. Which tools would you recommend?

The simplicity of CodeAcademy, code on the left, run button on the bottom, output on the right, is user friendly and intuitive for him at this stage.

 

[purbeast0]

best ide by far imo is intellij. not sure if they have a package for python or not.

a good plain old text editor that owns is sublime text.

 

[paperwastage]

best ide by far imo is intellij. not sure if they have a package for python or not.

a good plain old text editor that owns is sublime text.

IntelliJ is their main IDE, supports a lot of languages including python. they have a community edition (free)

Pycharm is their python-specific version of IDE. typically, features/changes hit PyCharm first, before moving upwards to IntelliJ. Pycharm has a community edition (free) too

obviously, the community edition are missing certain features. for IntelliJ, I can live without those features (coding in Java). don't know enough of python for pycharm



(as a java developer, highly recommend Intellij over eclipse/netbeans/...)

 

[slugg]

Pycharm Community Edition is pretty capable. There's not much it doesn't do, really. I feel like it covers more of the Python ecosystem than IntelliJ Community Edition covers the Java ecosystem.

 

[Net]

after he gets comfortable with an IDE then you can introduce him to www.github.com

he doesn't need to learn anything complicated with it. just how to add, commit, and push to save his work.

There is a graphical tool he can use for doing that: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com

You can start out by having him just use it when he's done with something. Like if he made "what number am I think of" game. Then he can push that up to github and have it saved for the future. He can show it off to his friends after that. Also, it will be nice for him to have that history of code if he wants to do software development career or show analytical thinking.

 

[beginner99]

Not an IDE but IPython Notebooks are very good to learn programming and to be able to see what happens. They basically are a much improved intermediate window.

To install it best and easiest way (especially on windows) is to use anaconda python distribution.

IPython notebooks can be shared online via according sites including GitHub. They can load and display images or can to plots and they are shown inline.

I think this is very helpful for beginners to help visualize what they program.