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Coding like a kid
May. 13th, 2022 03:56 pmI have this one student, maybe 12 years old, who is learning to code on Scratch just for himself for fun. Since it's not a school assignment, I don't have to have a stick up my ass about academic honestly and not "giving him the answers." If he is stuck on a problem, I can show him how to fix it if I think that's the best approach or I can implement my own code and then explain it step-by-step instead of painstakingly hot-colding him through every step. This makes the lessons a lot more fun because nothing is more annoying for both me and the student than when I have to endlessly prompt and prod lest I accidentally do too much work myself, especially if they are super lost. Lots of kids learn better by example, so it's nice when you can show them how to solve the problem and then have them recreate the solution themselves afterwards (I do this a lot in math since it's usually pretty easy to make up an example problem of my own, but in programming that's a LOT harder because you often need the context of the whole program to demonstrate ).
Anyway, he reaches out to me every day or two, and then we just play around on Scratch together for a couple of hours. He has half a dozen different games he is working on, and sometimes he gets an idea for a new game on the spot and decides he would rather work on that and come back to whatever we are currently working on later, so we just jump over to something new. No rules, no discipline, just carefree sandboxing.
The experience reminds me of when I taught an after-school robotics course for middle school kids. I loved hanging out with the kids (even though they were annoying as fuck sometimes), got to play with all kinds of expensive gadgets, and it was probably the last time I actually enjoyed a job (though it paid crap). Between the intellectual stimulation of low-stakes problem solving and the vicarious excitement of a kid who is learning stuff (he gets so amped when something WORKS), I am thinking maybe I should make teaching kids to code my full-time career. It's crazy, but this is the first thing in several years that has made me feel less dead inside.
Anyway, he reaches out to me every day or two, and then we just play around on Scratch together for a couple of hours. He has half a dozen different games he is working on, and sometimes he gets an idea for a new game on the spot and decides he would rather work on that and come back to whatever we are currently working on later, so we just jump over to something new. No rules, no discipline, just carefree sandboxing.
The experience reminds me of when I taught an after-school robotics course for middle school kids. I loved hanging out with the kids (even though they were annoying as fuck sometimes), got to play with all kinds of expensive gadgets, and it was probably the last time I actually enjoyed a job (though it paid crap). Between the intellectual stimulation of low-stakes problem solving and the vicarious excitement of a kid who is learning stuff (he gets so amped when something WORKS), I am thinking maybe I should make teaching kids to code my full-time career. It's crazy, but this is the first thing in several years that has made me feel less dead inside.
