Email I sent to parents talking about what we did in the first meeting.

code_club_week_1_email

Parents,

I hope the kids had a good time last night, I certainly did!  I wanted to let you know a little bit 
about what we covered, and give you some links to some videos we watched and tools we talked about 
in case you're interested or if they ask.

Just so you know, this meeting is really going to be driven by them.  I told them it is their time 
to ask and discuss whatever they want about code, computing, or technology.  I think it is really 
important for them to have a place to explore, learn and discuss the impact of the technology 
around them.  If I can't answer the questions, we'll look around a bit and see what we can find, 
and I'll follow up with an email like this one afterward.

We started out talking about what code is, what does it do, why should we learn it…even if we don't 
want to build apps or be a programmer.  I talked about how I think it is a bit like "How to Train 
Your Dragon."  Imagine the dragons are computers, and the vikings are us.  The vikings don't 
understand the dragons, and are frustrated and even afraid of the dragons.  Hiccup was the first to 
understand the dragons, and learned about what makes them tick, and learned to communicate with 
them.  After he learned what they needed, and how they 'think', he was able to be friends with the 
dragons instead of being frustrated by them, or even afraid of them.  He taught the other vikings 
this, and they learned to work and live together with the dragons, improving their lives and the 
dragons'.  I think the same is true with computers.  Knowing how to code, even if you don't plan to 
be a programmer, helps to understand how computers 'think', and help to anticipate what they're 
doing instead of being frustrated that the computer is 'slow' or 'got a virus', or how/why various 
other devices work or can even be hooked up together.  I truly believe that coding in today's 
world is becoming as important as learning math or reading.

Then we watched some videos!  This one is the code.org video that came out early last week:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU1xS07N-FA
It has a slight emphasis on careers, but I think the people they interview (creator of Facebook, 
twitter, microsoft, as well as NBA star, and lead singer of the Black Eyed Pease…and how young 
they are) had a impact on the boys.
They have some others if you want to check out the site/movement:
http://www.code.org/

There is a 12 year old that gave a TED talk about writing apps on the apple app store:
http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_suarez_a_12_year_old_app_developer.html
I just wanted to impress on them that coding isn't something that just adults do, and that they 
really can make an impact.  If they have an inspiration to do something, then don't let age get 
in the way.
After the meeting, this article came out, and I think it shows that it wasn't just one super smart 
kid, there are other examples of young kids finding ways to express themselves with apps, and have 
an impact:
http://mashable.com/2013/03/03/youth-innovators/

Then we talked about whatever topics they wanted.  We talked about Scratch, the programming tool 
from MIT:
http://scratch.mit.edu/
They have a community where the kids can share their projects, so we browsed around and played with 
what kids had shared.  There is another TED talk from one of the creators of Scratch.  I didn't show 
the boys, and it may be actually more for you parents if you're interested:
http://www.ted.com/talks/mitch_resnick_let_s_teach_kids_to_code.html

We also talked about:
- what kinds of devices need code to work
- what a programming language is
- what are some programming languages
- why are there multiple programming languages
- how does the program language file turn into something the computer understands
- do programmers use Word to write code (this turned into tools programmers use)
- what the command line is
- how do programmers share code
- what if programmers change the same file (version control, and http://github.com )
- what kind of programming do I do
- how they can think about how games work when they are playing them

I promise the boys brought all this up on their own, I didn't have a prepared list of topics.

We then had about a half hour to start learning the Python language from the book.  They learned 
some basics like how to do math problems, how to make the computer say "Hello" in text, and how to 
make variables so they can give the values names and makes the problems easier to understand.  I'm 
looking at one of their sessions and just love seeing them figure out things on their own.  We 
talked about how variables worked, and then they just tinkered around a bit.  Here is what Blix 
and Trag were doing:
-------------------------------------------
>>> blix
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#15>", line 1, in <module>
    blix
NameError: name 'blix' is not defined
>>> blix=30 P.E.=5
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> blix=20
>>> pe=5
>>> blix-pe
15
>>> blix*pe
100
-------------------------------------------

So, I love seeing here that they were trying things out, failing and figuring out on their own 
(they never asked me any questions here) what was wrong, and fixed it.  AND that they could start 
doing the math with the variables names instead (we hadn't covered that yet).  All the boys had 
examples like this.

If you don't have the book yet that is ok.  There is also an online tutorial they can do and it 
teaches some of the basics too without needing to install python:
http://www.learnstreet.com/lessons/study/python

Again, I had a ton of fun, and hope the boys did too!  Oh, and I wanted to say that I was curious 
if the 7 year olds would get bored, but honestly they were right up there with the big boys :)