Programming with Mommy

Sometimes the things you do turn around and bite you, and sometimes they make you smile.

So this afternoon I was watching this video in which Greg Wilson talks about programming techniques, programming fashions and the importance of evidence in deciding what to do and how to go about it. There's a section in the middle about the "why-women-can't-be-good-programmers" debate, and he mentions this book, which discusses it at length, with evidence.

So I got to thinking about coding and myself and my daughter. And it just so happens that we were chatting about Angry Bird this morning:

P:  Mommy, did you have Angry Birds when you were little?
S:  No... no, we didn't have anything like Angry Birds. We could listen to music on tapes or records; we could watch television. There weren't many computers. There weren't any videos or CD's. I remember the 1st video game. It came out when I was about 15. Actually, I can show you what it looked like... 

So we went and looked at 'Paddle Ball' at Khan Academy.

It's not the original Pong (nor is it the version that I remember seeing at a friend's house -- that was probably on an Atari VCS). It is close enough to that game that she could get the idea: not Angry Birds. And she could get another idea -- there was the code on the left side of the screen, and we could change it. We could make the ball pink, the background red, the paddle purple. We could change the sizes of the objects, and their speeds. We could interact with the game in a different way, and we did.

So my daughter got her introduction to programming at age 4.