Teaching My Daughter To Code
Recently, my daughter Sophie asked me to show her how to write a computer game. She is nine. (Well, only a few weeks away from being ten - at this age, a year still matters.) She has never written any code before. Now, there’s a challenge, if I ever saw one.
I am a computer scientist, and one of our projects is Greenfoot - a programming environment designed to teach kids (and older students) to code with Java. So far, that has all been part of my research work. Research into programming education, tool design, etc. I have used Greenfoot with kids (mostly about 15 years old), but more often I do presentations and workshops for teachers.
So I told Sophie that we'd do it. I have recorded my experiences of this ongoing journey in my blog. The first part is here:
The first part describes our first session. A few days later, we continued:
Teaching My Daughter To Code, Part II: Invasion of the Daleks
That's as far as we got up to now. I'll keep you posted...
- Login or register to post comments
- 602 reads
- Printer-friendly version
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
Comments
Rick Ross replied on Sat, 2008/01/26 - 7:16pm
Hi Michael,
It's great to see you here, and thanks for sharing your experience with Sophie so far. We really MUST get you to upload at least one or two of those awesome Dr. Who pictures into this posting! It was a brilliant choice of subject matter, my two daughters (8 and 11) are HUGE fans of David Tennant as Dr. Who.
Rick
Rick Ross replied on Sat, 2008/01/26 - 7:57pm
PS - for those who didn't make the connection, this is the project that inspired us to create KidsCodeZone.com.
Thanks, Michael!