Good robotics/coding class for a 9-hr old obsessed with both? 22043

[Anonymous]

Title says it all. I have a third grader who LOVES coding and robotics and has taken tons of classes at Rec Centers. I think he's outgrowing those, and I'd love to get him into a more serious program, ideally with a yearlong curriculum, but don't know of any. Generation Code in Vienna has closed. Do you all have any ideas?

[Anonymous]

Sorry, can't ignore the quintassential DCUM thread where a mom is agonzing over her 9 hour old child obsessed with robotics and coding.

[Anonymous]

Find a first Lego league team. In Maryland, Rockville Robotics can help connect you to other potential team mates, but I don't know of an equivalent Virginia group.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Find a first Lego league team. In Maryland, Rockville Robotics can help connect you to other potential team mates, but I don't know of an equivalent Virginia group.

+1 There's a VA-DC group: https://va-dcfll.org/

It has a "find a team" feature, but your best bet is to see if there is one through your school, PTA, or local community organization.

[Anonymous]

Look up Mindframe--they are out of Loudoun County but have some satellite programs.

[Anonymous]

In defense of the mom, as a 9-year-old kid, I was obsessed with coding on my little Apple IIe. I would have LOVED to have classes. Instead, I got all the coding books and magazines that I could get my hands on (not many since my parents didn't have the money to buy them), and taught myself.

Honestly the best way to learn to code once you get some basics down is to do lots of personal projects and struggle through it. The Internet will provide plenty of examples and tutotrials at this point. You learn a lot in the process of self-teaching.

I went on to major in computer science and am now an exec at a tech company. Many of the other students I met in engineering school had similar stories -- obsessed with coding since elementary school.

[Anonymous]

My kid has done a couple camps at Coder Kids in McLean and really enjoyed them. He also did a funbots camp this summer and liked that too. We may try to find a lego robotics activity.