My 8 year old came bursting through the door yesterday after school, he caused such a stir that I thought something was wrong!

It turns out, that his school is going to be starting a Coding Club for Kids. He was ecstatic!

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The photo below is crinkled, because this paper was in his hand running all the way home.

I have tried to introduce coding to my son a few times. But it wasn't until we found scratch that he actually understood what he was doing. Scratch breaks down programing into blocks of instructions. It replaces confusing code, with a more visual approach that helps kids understand how computers follow instructions. Scratch is an educational initiative developed by MIT to help kids get into coding. Being that I have very little programming knowledge, this has turned out to be a wonderful tool for both of us.

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He's a bright young boy, and he likes to challenge himself academically. Since he was putting forth the effort and excited to learn something new. I thought it would be cool to wipe one of my old laptops and make it his. I set it up with a cool Minecraft background for him, and loaded it with all of the programs that he will need. Of course I added all of the parental controls as well. Still wanting to keep him innocent. haha.

We've been watching plenty of tutorials. Our local library even had a Coding in Scratch book that we checked out. He started out slow, learning the basics. Progressively he's getting more creative. Its amazing how fast kids learn. It's gotten to the point now, that our PS4 is starting to collect dust. He is so excited to come home and code, creating animations and games in Scratch. It rained the whole weekend here, and he happily stayed inside letting his creativity run wild, to the point where I had to make him stop and eat his dinner.

I think that its important for kids to learn how to program. Its something that I wish, I had done when I was his age. The way I see it, everything in the future is going to be ran by some type of code. If you are going to learn a second language, why not computer language? I think it will help him out in his future. Plus, he's like me, he likes computers and technology. I think I'm going to start paying him his allowance in Cryptocurrency. ;)

I am very proud of him, and hopefully he finds some like minded friends in his Coding Club. We started out together, but he has already left me in the dust. I don't have the energy to keep up with him. However, I would eventually like to learn Python.

Anyone else teaching their kids to Code? How do you feel about it?

Thanks for taking the time to stop by friends!

-steemengines

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