“The island itself is only two million, but of course we’d want a house and stuff like that… so do you think if we work together we can earn 8 million dollars? That way we’ll each still have three million to spend.” Sigh. Such is the typical back-seat conversation these days as we go to and from school. And to think a few months ago they were saving up for the new Tamagotchi.
So far they’ve scraped together 60 dollars or so and have been trying to think of ways to earn more. Then they heard about that kid who outdid Angry Birds. “Maybe we could write an app too!” I couldn’t care less about money. Still, being the geeky mom I am, I told them they’d have to learn to program.
“What language would you like to try first?” Mary suggested English, Spanish, or Arabic. My bad. So after a quick explanation and some poking around for kid-friendly programming introductions in Google, they decided to start with Java in Judo, and try new a language and another IDE in a week or two.
Last night after Ethan discovered the graphics capabilities and had played around with it a bit, I thought I’d show him how to change colors based on user input. But I was getting errors, and it was time to read scriptures, so we left it for the night. Immediately after school today:
“Hey look! It compiled… and… come on… yup! It works!”
“Oh yeah? What was wrong?”
“You had the favColor variable as a String, and it should have been a Color.”
“Got ya. How’d you figure that out?”
“I checked the manual.”
Warms my nerdy little heart.
Legend of Velda 
That’s pretty cool! Ethan is a good little nerd! We love it!
I might suggest that your kids would be interested in the following:
http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for-kids/ – Python for kids about Ethan and Mary’s age.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9055536763288165825# – At about 24:30, you can see a demonstration of Squeak (http://www.squeak.org/) from Alan Kay. It’s specifically designed to help kids learn to program.
Anyway, really cool stuff that your kiddos are so interested in coding. Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Clint
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Thanks, Clint! I’m definitely going to encourage them to keep trying on on new languages (so they don’t get stuck in one — same reason they’ve both used Linux, Windows, and Mac) and Python could well be next. Glad to have some good links to work with! š
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I’d also recommend http://inventwithpython.com/
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Thanks DtD š He’s checking it out now. And Mary is doing her homework! š®
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That’s pretty cool! Ethan is a good little nerd! We love it!
I might suggest that your kids would be interested in the following:
http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for-kids/ – Python for kids about Ethan and Mary’s age.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9055536763288165825# – At about 24:30, you can see a demonstration of Squeak (http://www.squeak.org/) from Alan Kay. It’s specifically designed to help kids learn to program.
Anyway, really cool stuff that your kiddos are so interested in coding. Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Clint
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Thanks, Clint! I’m definitely going to encourage them to keep trying on on new languages (so they don’t get stuck in one — same reason they’ve both used Linux, Windows, and Mac) and Python could well be next. Glad to have some good links to work with! š
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Thanks Clint and Dexter!
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Thanks Clint and Dexter!
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