A *very* seasoned software engineer, I wrote my first basic game, a lunar landing game, in Basic in 1969. Currently I am doing web development in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Elm.
For years now I've been considering this as an approach to teaching; many places have done something similar to this in that they provide the test cases and you have to write the code that passes them.
Putting the emphasis on testing, and the development/test tools and environment, probably doesn't meet some folks expectations of learning, but I think it's both reinforcing learning the syntax and learning the concepts of problem solving. Tests are code, and it's a very legitimate way to learn how to program.
Only one thing I'd add at even this early stage is version control, learning to branch and merge, make incremental improvements, and having code reviews as part of that.
For years now I've been considering this as an approach to teaching; many places have done something similar to this in that they provide the test cases and you have to write the code that passes them.
Putting the emphasis on testing, and the development/test tools and environment, probably doesn't meet some folks expectations of learning, but I think it's both reinforcing learning the syntax and learning the concepts of problem solving. Tests are code, and it's a very legitimate way to learn how to program.
Only one thing I'd add at even this early stage is version control, learning to branch and merge, make incremental improvements, and having code reviews as part of that.
Yep git will be introduced in the very near Future. But i don't want to overwhelm him with a million Things at once.
But the plan ist that he will soonish do small things in a customer project. Before that there is no way around learning the git basics.
The idea of the providing tests is really good. I will definitely add a challenge like that to the project.