Tag: children

Party hard!

Those of us who are of legal drinking age know how to tell a good party from the bad one – if you passed out and can’t remember most of the evening, then you must have had a really good time.  If you were home in time for evening news – you don’t know how to party.  All that is no news.  But, how do you figure out if a kid’s party was any good?  After all the youngsters won’t drink or pass out.  Well, here is one way to measure the fun.  Just count how many bones were broken?  Bonus points for having more than one per limb.

Maxim hand cast

Here’s Maxim with two broken bones in his left hand after a birthday party he attended on Sunday.  From what I hear, it was tonnes of fun.

Nobody knows how exactly that happened – it was in the midst of the usual kids’ fun at the playground, with lots of running, rolling, jumping, and so forth.  One person told me that this was during a reenactment of the TV show featured on the Discover channel a couple of days earlier, where horse were refusing to jump over obstacles, making the people riding them fall in spectacular manner.  For all those “don’t try it at home” warnings, I think, they’ve missed one on this show…

Code.org – Learn an hour of code

Maxim mentioned code.org to me a couple of times last week, but I didn’t have the time to check it out.  Today, however, he said that “Learn an hour of code” was his homework for the computer class.  That got me quite interested.  After all, I was exploring looking for an easy way to get him (and some other kids) into computer programming.  We’ve tried bits and pieces of online tutorials here and there, YouTube videos, and I’ve even took a swing at it myself – all for nothing.  It was all too boring and broad and it always required plenty of effort to get into.

code.org

And I’m happy to report – that’s where Code.org succeded.  These guys have found a way to explain things in a very simplistic manner, with immediate practical exercises, which utilize drag-n-drop instead of typing (even a seasoned programmer is rarely a touch typist in my experience), familiar surroundings of Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies games, and short, yet motivational explanations of core concepts by computer industry celebrities, like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.  There also a familiar gaming incentive to the experience, with badges and achievements, but those aren’t the core motivator.

We’ve spent about an hour with Maxim, going through tutorials and doing exercises.   So far, it was a perfect balance of fun and education.  But for me, it there was also another important aspect to this.  I could finally show to my son what I do at work (well, not exactly what I do, but close enough).  Explaining programming with words and showing bits of code and chunks of website never looked too appealing.  Now however he has a better idea.

And for the first time he is actually excited about programming.  So much in fact that I could barely get him to go to bed.  We had to make plans for tomorrow to continue to calm him down a bit.

Thanks code.org!  You guys have done an amazing job.  Keep it up!