Which online education platform has the best value for learning how to code for kids?

I think the first thing to do is get them to appreciate the power of the command line. So put together some cheap linux machines and get them used to it. If you put them online, they may start to believe that everything is browser based. That’s a crippling concept. You have got to show them the raw stuff and get them comfortable.

I remember getting all of my kids on Ubuntu, and so they got used to that. But when I wrote a small counting loop in Ruby my daughter was absolutely spellbound that the computer could count to a million in under a second. So we went on from there. Well, how long would it take to count to 2 million? Oh, for that we need a variable to represent the number to count to…

None of my kids cared much about coding but now one of them does webstuff for her marketing job. But the point was that they knew what was under the hood. Getting kids to und...