Quoting: denyasisI know I'm veering a bit away from gaming, but does anyone know of any other decent educational resources for teaching computing skills for younger kids?

That really depends on which skills. Work that out, and the rest is probably straightforward. They'll learn plenty from watching you do stuff and being allowed to try it.

For some examples - my little one can find his online homework, can play around with Scratch (they use that at school, too, as an extra-curricular activity), and can find YouTube. He can create things in Tux Paint and print them off. He's been able to circle-strafe since he was two because he'd seen me do that, and he's released his own music because he'd seen my other half do that. He can open Steam and pick a game to play, and he can run server commands in Minecraft. If a particular child is interested in creating digital artwork, animations, long-form writing, or whatever, it's only really a case of pointing them towards the appropriate tool and letting them go, with maybe finding some specific resources if they need to solve a particular problem.

Quoting: denyasisI know I'm veering a bit away from gaming, but does anyone know of any other decent educational resources for teaching computing skills for younger kids?

I place myself behind CatKiller, but since you used the general term I suspect you heard it somewhere.
The normal place to hear it in a childs' education is in advertisement for extra- curricular "computing courses".
I've a information about that.
If schools sell "computer skills" on top of the normal curriculum they, in my experience, always mean blind typing.
Blind typing is a useful, but not a deciding tool to have in your toolbox.
There is a giant array of tools available for it(parents are a really profitable target audience).
My advice if you want to teach your kids this: buy stickers and/or post-its in the local store stick them on the key caps and start training with KTouch.

That's a good point, guys! My apologies for being a little too general. I'm, unfortunately, entirely self/family taught, so im very aware I'm missing a lot of fundamentals (even proper terminology). Even worse, when I sat down to show my kid, I realized I couldn't really explain how or why I was doing what I was doing *facepalm*. Hence my question.

The kids use computers at school for quite a bit of learning, including typing, math, reading, even presentations (my 6yo had to do a digital presentation last year). I was kinda thinking resources in the intro to programming realm. That seems to be the main thing lacking from school.

On the plus side, I *tried* to explain a bit of the terminal to my oldest.... Now They will only turn off the computer using terminal commands, lol!!

Thanks for the advice, I'll do more "co-computing" (is that the right term?). I really like that idea especially since we can talk through frustrations (and hopefully set the stage for talking about online interactions once we get there)

Thank you friends!!

Ps - throwing a vote in for Besiege! My now 10yo really enjoys the building part and the challenges of the puzzles. I got the idea of having them try it after watching them build all sorts of contraptions in Zelda.

Quoting: denyasisI was kinda thinking resources in the intro to programming realm. That seems to be the main thing lacking from school.

There are resources like Kids Can Code for tutorials end examples and things, but also Human Resource Machine. If the fundamentals of working out how to instruct a computer to do your bidding and coming up with your own algorithms are things that appeal to them then they're likely to enjoy Human Resource Machine; if not, then they probably won't enjoy programming.

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: denyasisI was kinda thinking resources in the intro to programming realm. That seems to be the main thing lacking from school.

There are resources like Kids Can Code for tutorials end examples and things, but also Human Resource Machine. If the fundamentals of working out how to instruct a computer to do your bidding and coming up with your own algorithms are things that appeal to them then they're likely to enjoy Human Resource Machine; if not, then they probably won't enjoy programming.

That's the very game with which I tried to show my 6yos some weeks ago what strange stuff daddy is doing all the day in front of the computer when working. :D

My son and I had lots of fun with the frog detective games lately (Steam / itch.io). Every game has a case to solve and all three together have an overarching storyline.

Quoting: pentadragoMy son and I had lots of fun with the frog detective games lately (Steam / itch.io). Every game has a case to solve and all three together have an overarching storyline.

Frog Detective is love!

I have also enjoyed Later Alligator which is equally silly, but with gameplay more focused on mini-games.

Quoting: denyasisI will throw a vote in for Scratch. It's very nice!

I personally prefer Turbowarp, both for myself, and when I teach programming to my younger siblings. I'm just one of a very big family and we're homeschooled, so technology class is a bit different, but thanks to me half of the computers in the house are Linux so that's something. Anyway, Turbowarp is like scratch except it's faster and has a dark mode (to protect the wee ones eyes)

Quoting: denyasisI know I'm veering a bit away from gaming, but does anyone know of any other decent educational resources for teaching computing skills for younger kids?

The way I was taught computer literacy buy just playing games. If you want something educational, try Gcompris it looked solid. Do not get anything from endless studios, because their educational games were pretty janky and terrible.

Personally, my siblings and I got our computer literacy on an old Mac with a ton of games from the learning company like Treasure Mountain and Zoombeanies. You can get zoombeanies from steam, but I would suggest not, I was in contact with the developers and the publishers on steam having been pushing for updates.

Educational resources or games I honestly think have kind of slumped since then, and I would gladly work on any project to try to make an open source game with them.

It might have already been mentioned, but Minetest is a solid choice for a minecraft like game. Especially if you then start teaching them lua. There is work on making 0 A.D. "educational" but it is definitely not for kids.

Quoting: denyasisI was kinda thinking resources in the intro to programming realm. That seems to be the main thing lacking from school.

I want to give my totally unsolicited teaching kid to code advice, first thing is don't do it on the internet. The internet is too dangerous to let younger kids on without strict supervision. I'd suggest starting with a board game that teaches them the basic sequential functions. I own one called Code Master, but there are others.

After that (or if you don't want to buy a game, but I think it's the best way) familiarize yourself with scratch, then help them make a game, or download a scratch tutorial. Just be ready to help if something goes wrong. Repeat this a few times with different scratch projects.

These first two steps are supposed to specifically get the kids to be able to think like a programmer. Once that's done, I personally think it's useless to keep them on gamified programming platforms and just jump into writing actual code. Find an easy language like python and familiarize yourself with it (they will come to you for help) then give them a good intro to python coding book. I liked the ones from DK and Al swiegart.

One very important thing remember however when teaching children to code, is that each child is different, some might not be interested, and I'm not sure whether that's something you need to push (it's up to your discretion however), also if one tutorial/teaching method doesn't work with a child try a different one. If you're teaching the kids yourself, you have that flexibility.

This just occurred to me last night: Thomas Was Alone. It's got a very gentle progression of mechanics, an excellent narrator, and the characters are all rectangles of various colors. It's not too long, not too hard, and very good. It should also run on nearly anything at this point, it's over a decade old.