Many years ago at school we were told. You can open with 13 points and you can reply with 6. Enjoy!

A couple of years ago, I went to formal lessons. Our teacher was a bit more specific. But as a 14 year old chucking cards around the table was the best way of getting started. Maybe there is a difference between a Bridge Society at school and formal lessons from an affiliated Club.

In the second quarter of the 20th century nearly everybody, young or old, played bridge by "chucking cards around the table"

And a small number of those were keen enough to play better by learning to play duplicate at clubs.
Nowadays that feeder for club membership appears to have disappeared

Which means clubs need to rely on formal lessons to boost membership
And a lot of them "get bombarded with "but you only had 8 points !" and get discouraged" as Giles says

Thats why I believe it could be better to "just teach them the procedure and rules of the game and scoring and give them cards to bid and play and score"

I think Karen's suggestion is a good one. I used to teach bridge at Wellington College, with only shortish lunchtimes available (about 50 minute). I found MiniBridge got them started playing with cards in their hands within 3 minutes and as a bonus they accidentally got to learn quite a bit about bridge (e.g. how to add up their high-card points, part of the rules of MiniBridge).

Some very good players started there - including Liam Milne and Pieter Vanderpoel! And plenty more had heaps of fun and will probably want to learn bridge properly later in life.

Agree wholeheartdly. To much information. Need to teach basics and not go into too much depth. I think we all learnt more once we came out of lessons and started playing.

We need to have a mid ground between Mini Bridge and the current lessons. I intend next year basing my lessons on the cheat sheet!

I have recently rdiscovered Bridge and am now trying to teach my adult children. As background we all knew how to play "500" well so bidding, trumps, no trumps, taking tricks, counting trumps etc were well understood. 

I initally tried using the cheat sheets for bidding but did not get into playing the cards quickly enough. Also the concept of a dummy was off-putting for some. I have now discovered "mini bridge" whicnh has revolutionised their interest and learning.  As well it introduces scoring which I had ignored as too compicated and added an extra icentive to our play. 

To our family (and their friends) avoiding the complications of biding to start helped capture their interest in bridge. It allowed us to play cards from the get go, discuss our points openly, decide on the appropriate contract openly and score competitively. It is still early days but I hope to reintroduce the acol system using the NZ Bridge notes in the near future.

I have recently rediscovered Bridge and am now trying to teach my adult children. As background we all knew how to play "500" well so bidding, trumps, no trumps, taking tricks, counting trumps etc were well understood. 

I initally tried using the NZ bridge cheat sheets for bidding but did not get into playing the cards quickly enough. Also the concept of a dummy was off-putting for some. I have now discovered "mini bridge" which has revolutionised their interest and learning.  As well, it introduces scoring which I had ignored as too compicated and this added an extra incentive to our play. 

To our family (and their friends) avoiding the complications of bidding to start helped capture their interest in bridge. It allowed us to play cards from the get go, discuss our points openly, decide on the appropriate contract openly and score competitively. It is still early days but I hope to reintroduce the acol system using the NZ Bridge notes in the near future.