One of the main thing my nephew wants to make is VIDEO GAMES!!!! I think this is awesome and one of the best “gateway drugs” into getting hooked on code. It was certainly my gateway drug back in junior high/high school. Many of my friends have similar (fond) memories.
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We’re currently jamming around with Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu ). Holy shit, what an awesome tool. It’s a sprite-first programming language! Effortless to get your own drawing up on the screen, dancing around and bouncing off the walls.
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Scratch has a host of problems, sure. But any “real” language makes you jump through so many meaningless hoops just to move something around on a canvas. And by that point you’ve lost all your momentum and most of your motivation. I wish I had scratch as a kid!
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I actually find it really hard to collaborate in Scratch. But it doesn’t matter because it’s great for small projects + easy to “view source” and learn from others. So my nephew is already off to the races, leveling up on his own. And we can collaborate on many other things.
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... like building a web page. Last week I thought it would be cool to show him how to build a website/homepage. A place where he can put links to his Scratch games, but also his drawings, music, etc. Plus his own domain name, because that makes it 10x more fun.
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I remember this was a huge creative avenue for me as well, in high school. I never had cool clothes or dyed hair or stickers on my backpack, but I made a lot of fun websites. That was my preferred form of self-expression.
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One interesting conversation we had last week was around copyright. He was worried about other people stealing his drawings! I tried to explain the difference between the copyright/patent mentality and the CC/open source mentality. He 100% wanted his IP locked down
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I hope this is something he’ll come to understand differently as he gets older. What a compliment it is to be copied! But I also remember liking that feeling of ownership when I was younger. I wanted to slap a © on everything I made! I wonder where that came from.....
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Today I showed him the Chrome “inspect element”/dev tools console. It’s great to be able to tweak things and watch the page react instantly. But it’s also crazy just how complicated the modern web has become.
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I don’t know how to strike the right balance between the precision and intelligibility of low-level tooling (e.g. HTML) vs. the power of high-level tooling (e.g. a template language + CSS). How important is it these days to understand the web from the bottom up?
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(Also, I realize that one person’s “bottom layer” is another person’s towering abstraction. Even raw HTML is impossible far from the metal. But at least it’s a consistent/coherent/portable technology, unlike much of what gets written on top of it.)
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Anyway, that’s all for now. More later I hope. Thanks for letting me brain-dump!
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