Kids

Strange times, these. But equally, a time to focus on new things and indeed a time to pursue experiences we might not have done otherwise. As Ari now spends his days learning from home, I wanted to really start focusing more on his coding not just for his own benefit, but for all the other kids out there who are in the same home-bound predicament he now finds himself in. So, this week we're going to do an hour of coding each morning and live stream it via YouTube. We'll take questions during the sessions and if you have anything you'd really like to see us cover, leave a comment below and we'll do our best to roll it into...

Today is Safer Internet Day which marks the annual occurrence of parents thinking about their kids' online presence (before we go back to thinking very little about it tomorrow!) It's also the day the Courier-Mail here in my home state of Queensland published a piece on sharenting or as Wikipedia more accurately describes it, the practice of "sharing too much information" about your kids online. That's a worthy discussion to have on this day, although the opening paragraph started out, well... just read it: Reported in today’s Courier-Mail here in Queensland: should parents “ask their toddlers for permission before taking a photo”? What say you, internet? pic.twitter.com/65m4gj9mZB — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) February 11, 2020 I was...

Geez time flies. It's just a tad under 4 years ago that I wrote about teaching kids to code with code.org which is an amazing resource for young ones to start learning programming basics. In that post I shared a photo of my then 6-year-old son Ari holding a Lenovo Yoga 900 I gifted him as part of the Insiders program I'm involved in: He got a lot of mileage out of that machine and learned a lot about the basics of both code and using a PC. Today seemed like a good time to follow up on that post, starting with a new machine: This one is a Lenovo Yoga C940 and for full disclosure, it came courtesy...

When I first started writing code a few decades ago, it was a rather bland affair involving a basic text editor and physical books for reference. I didn't have an opportunity to create anything usable by others until years later and perhaps most importantly in the context of this blog post, I didn't have anyone in my family able to teach me about coding. For many kids today, that last point is still just as relevant as it was in the 80's and 90's with one major caveat - it doesn't have to be. Teaching your kids to code is easier today than ever before with zero experience required. Since my kids have been around 6 years old, I've been...

Last week I published the first post of Kids and Code where I started recording the process of teaching my six-year-old son to code. We used code.org which is just awesome, specifically the Minecraft game which has just the right balance of difficulty, engagement and entertainment. It’s mostly dragging and dropping blocks which represent procedures, but it’s a great way of getting kids to think about the structure that goes into code. Even at six years old, Ari picked it up very quickly and is genuinely enjoying it, so we recorded another one with some more advanced concepts. Here’s another short clip where he starts using two fundamental coding constructs. Firstly, there are...

There are few more valuable skills for kids these days than knowing their way around technology. In fact, I’d argue that you could say the same for adults but particularly when you consider the skills that are going to be most valuable in the future for our children, understanding how the connected world functions is key. Their existence is fundamentally different to ours and if you were born in the 70’s like me (or even earlier), just think about how fundamentally different their education and social interactions are; we had no Wikipedia to refer to, no online discussions to ask questions in and frequently, not even a PC to type on (I was a teenager before...