Teaching my daughter to code — Video of our livestream
If you’ve been following me on social media you know by now, I am in the process of teaching my daughter to code.
Right now, my main focus is to work on the logic, the design and the process of thinking in code rather than actual syntax and implementation.
We’ve been talking about “building something” for couple of months now.
We started off with soldering simple circuits. We built a mobile app together and we are talking through the design of other things.
All through this process I am letting her lead, she sets the pace and the idea are 100% hers. I am trying to be there for her for support but I definitely am not pushing her in any direction and making sure it’s a fun learning process and doesn’t turn to “work”.
Previous “episodes”
Dad, I want to be a scientist
What I love **the most** about this process is seeing how this is a creative outlet for her. She likes to think about the process and the solutions and I try to give her problems along the way and let her think them through.
She’s talking about being a scientist and I explain the thinking and solving problems are one of the most important qualities of a scientist.
Our current project
Our current project began with her wanting to build a robot, one she can command to do things like “go right” “go left” and pick up things.
Building a robot like this is not a hard task but it is time consuming and until you are at the final stages you lack the visual confirmation of what you’ve done.
This is very hard on a 7 year old so we were talking about a different project. I tried to ask her what else she’d like in her life that she can build on her own since this robot is not for us right now.
My goal is that after every session we have something she can see and use and understands the progress from the previous session
The commanding alarm clock
She came up with the idea of “the commanding alarm clock” (name is mine for clarity).
This is an alarm clock that after waking her up, tells her what to do. Displays it on a screen and she clicks to get her next task.
The gearing up
We went on a Fry’s trip. Looking through the gear that we will need for this task
- RasperryPI
- Touch Screen
- Stand for this to be on her bedside.
- Enclosing so it will look nice.
It all comes down to about 130$.
This is the point where we discussed whether we should prove what she wants is viable **before** we commit to spending money on it and have gear we don’t need lying around the house.
We talked about how can we prove this works without completing the electronics and we decided we’re going to make it work on the computer first. Have it working on the iPad and later “move” it to the device itself.
This was very important for me, I wanted her to understand that it’s very smart to prove your point in a minimal way, before you move on to buying things and committing to too much time and money.
Even though it wasn’t in a lot of words, we had an understanding
Working with the excitement inertia
With kids, it’s important to work with their excitement. If we would have stopped during that Fry’s run we might never really circle back. She’s 7 and every day is different so it’s easy for her to forget and get excited about something else.
We went back home and immediately sat down to code.
I asked her if she wanted to stream our session and let the world see. She was immediately into it.
The rest, you can see in the video.
Feel free to ask questions. I will pass those questions over to Nesli (be kind) and let her answer. In the video she also answered some questions and had a blast.
We talked about the video later and she was very excited about it, even before going to sleep as we tucked them in, she talked about some of the comments that were made during our recording.
