On Wednesday, January 28, 2015 at 9:48:48 PM UTC, Ferretygubbins wrote:
I know this is OT but I rather suspect that some of you will be able to
help.

Boy1 (13) is interested in learning how to write code and so I would like to
set him up with a toolkit for his PC (Windows) unfortunately my programming
days are somewhat in the past and restricted to MUMPS which was archaic even
back then. Has anyone any suggestions for a suitable platform? As ever the
cheaper the better.

Cheers

Mark


You could get him a copy of SCRATCH for his PC http://scratch.mit.edu/ . It's free and it's very good. SCRATCH is visual, you 'plug together' the statements and they only fit in syntactically correct ways. My daughter (9) writes little games in SCRATCH.


Or, you could buy him a Raspberry Pi computer (costs £100 with keyboard mouse etc but needs a TV with HDMI input). With that he gets the programming language SCRATCH and PYTHON.

Then buy him Minecraft on the Pi (costs very little or maybe free). It is simpler than the PC version, but you can access the code (Python I think) that it is written in and modify it. There is whole world of Minecraft Mods..

Robert