Kids can build macOS apps, too!
using Xcode — and a bit of guidance here and there
I’ve confirmed it with Albert, my 5.5 years old son, no more than a couple of days ago.
While he’s just able to read and write, he does already seem very passionate about Scratch instead (here is his public account* — he often skips playing games on the iPad if he can build small ones himself instead), and I’m absolutely certain that many other kids of his age and surely many of the older ones can or can be guided to go for it too: with little to no help they can grasp the minimally required programming concepts — such as if branches, while loops, and variables — and they can then create small yet interesting games and sometimes very useful apps themselves!
Trust me: once they’d feel the joy of the creator, they’ll live for it — always and forever. (A good thing.)
I’ve tried it with my older son, Robert, as well, since he was about 5 or 6 years old. While the results weren’t exactly the same — Robert is and he always was interested into other things, like geography and statistics, more — he did learn to craft small things with Basic and later Python too (here’s also a Basic tutorial* that I’ve put together myself a couple of years ago, inspired from his journey.)
