Code.org: teaching my daughters to code.

In the future the internet will strangle out many colleges and universities. Turns out it doesn't actually cost $50,000/yr to learn ancient Greek. Yes, you'll miss out on some drinking and sex with other like minded MDMA enhanced furry wearing young people with their hot bods and weird fashion, but you'll also skip the $200k that it costs to go there over a few years. The other thing they don't teach you is that roughly 1 in every 2 kids will fail out. So, they'll take your money for 2 years, but you won't have shit to show for it... except loans. Assloads of loans.

What will stick around?

Demonstratable skills. Comepetence. That's what will matter. Because the internet will kill the barrier between just about anything. You'll have online universities with one on one learning with whoever you want. They'll get here, and they'll be far cheaper than what you pay now.

In the job market what people look for is the ability to work as a team, work ethic, and necessary skills to get a job done. It's possible that this world will keep having a broken economy such that one currency is worth 100x more than many others and that you're forced to use the currency of the geographic region that you live in, but I suspect that will die too.

What I am saying is that in the not too distant future you're not gonna be able to just pay some poor 3rd world kid chump change to do your menial tasks because internet money is gonna change that.

What about repitition?

There are menial tasks that need to get done a million times a day. Someone has to do them. It's gonna be too expensive to hire even 3rd worlders, so you gotta do it yourself or automate it. I think it's gonna be automation. That means programming. So, I'm working on getting my kids to learn to program.

Code.org

Here's a screenshot of an activity my 5 year old is doing. She's arranging those blocks to help get her little angry bird to the piggy. it starts with some really easy stuff, it's designed for readers and non-readers depending which lessons they work on, and it's teaching her some very basics of code.

The blocks actually represent lines of code. As things get more complicated they involve more types of code and the task is more complex. It has loops and you build in some logic, and it gets their brain thinking how to do this in a way that's fun.

Getting them to do it

My wife and I are still debating this, but I want to pay my kids small amounts of money. They enjoy code, but when they are incentivized to code on top of that it's the easiest thing in the world. Wanna do this? YES!!! YAYYY!! WOOHOOO! they say. That's how I want my kids feeling about this learning because I think it's the greatest skill I can make them learn as a father.

Today is a holiday. You can bet your ass we'll be learning to code as a family.

Happy Turkey Day!