brad_frostI’m dropping in to talk to on my 8-year-old’s school coding club tomorrow.
What should I talk to them about: Webpack config or end-to-end testing frameworks?
But seriously, what would you say to a group of 8 year olds about coding?
Eric Newport@brad_frost Visual learning works best for that age group. My first thought is showing them something like flexbox froggy or CSS grid garden, but there are probably even better ones out there that are more kid-focused.
Laurie Voss"Did you know you can make your own websites?" Followed by like 3 HTML tags.
Eric A. Meyer@seldo This is the Way.
Greg Knauss
John TimaeusIf you've got an hour, walk them through a "what's your birthday? ; you are $x years and $y days old"
Bash or powershell, or whatever they're currently working in.
Or anything else with a user input, simple computation, and output.
definitely just a musicianFrom my vast array of experiments with kids
They like the coloring
They like the music
They like the camera
If they can play with any of those and you can explain that you made those toys, they’ll love you
Curious CarrotLet them play with CSS filters for silly image manipulation.
spartanatreyu@brad_frost Do the "make a sandwich with exact instructions" experiment with them.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR25vZJEKeo
They give you the exact instructions on how to make a sandwich. Once you have the instructions, perform them exactly as specified making sure to mess up the result as much as possible whenever something can be interpreted in more then one way.
Then you teach them two lessons:
Teacher Follows Student Instructions to Make a Sandwich — Hilarious Results!
@brad_frost
1. Programming is all about writing instructions to get the result you want.
2. It's never the computer's fault. Computers don't make mistakes, they do exactly what they are programmed to do.
Then (depending on how much time you have)...
@brad_frost you could play a game with them on the board where you draw two checkerboard/gameboard states and they all need to figure out the instructions to get from the starting state to the end state.
---
And if you want audience participation:
1. You could also get them to each draw their own states
2. Pass the states to someone else and figure out and write down the instructions before giving them back
3. Get them to perform their partner's instructions to see if they get the end state
Scott Jenson@brad_frost ooooh! ooooh! This could be fun. The classic "make a PB&J is both maddening but instructive about how hard it is to write clear directions.
However, I don't think making a PB&J in class is very easy to do though. I"ve seen this also done with just a jacket on a chair. Getting them to tell you how to pick up hold, and wear the jacket is just as crazy and MUCH easier.