Kevin Simler

It would be easy to say I’m “teaching” him how to program, but that’s not at all how it feels. More like I’m just sitting next to him while he learns, occasionally teeing things up for him.

I also don’t see my role as helping him learn how to *program* per se. It’s more like I want him to be as creatively powerful as possible, and writing code is one way to do that.

The kid is exceptionally creative and it’s fun just to watch him do his thing, across a variety of art forms. In addition to coding, he also sings, dances, acts, draws, and plays/composes music. (And maybe some other things I don’t know about.)

I’m especially in awe of how quickly/decisively my nephew chooses what to do next. I feel I’ve lost a lot of that spontaneity. I hem and haw over every little decision. It’s exhausting! (Is this most adults, or just me?)

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.

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!

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.

... 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.

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.

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

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.....

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.

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?

(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.)