codingbowlingball-blog

[codingbowlingball-blog]

Coding Adventure: The Beginning

A “Bowling ball”, a “Saphire”, and a “VHS tape” all walk into a room: sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. Actually, they are all fictional characters my 12 year old brother came up with, in his first attempt at cartooning. I have no clue how he came up with them in his pre-teen brain, but I have to admit, his characters are quite iconic. But could our plan ever really work? Could we successfully teach middle school kids how to code?  Some context: I am a high school junior and had a busy schedule planned for the summer. I was planning for balancing internships, sports, and summer classes, but Coronavirus royally messed up most of my plans. My brother has much more time on his hands, so he is currently spending lots of time working on his animations. He is pretty smart and creative, so my dad, who is a webapp developer, promised to start teaching him some coding in his free time, as long as my brother spends more time studying Greek. I took AP Computer Science A in school this past year and I found Java interesting and pretty straightforward. I enjoyed using mathematical concepts in a creative way - my favorite unit was 2D arrays; in particular, I enjoyed a “game of life” program project I coded. My dad maintains that Javascript is much simpler than Java and that the basic principles of Java still apply, so I would have absolutely no problem learning and using Javascript. So, my brother, my dad, and I connected all the dots and came up with a project: we are going to make bilingual tutorials for web-app development, using simple fun games and my brother’s animations as examples. Sure there are a ton of educational materials out there, but which are taught by a bowling ball and offered in Greek? We are going to help Greek or English speaking middle school kids (like my brother) to have fun with cute animated characters while learning how to code. Our goal isn’t to make these kids coding “professionals”, so we won’t be employing a formal approach. Rather we hope to inspire them to experiment, modify, and break our code. So far, we have set up roles: I will be the project leader and the main coder. My brother will be the animator, voice actor, and translator (with my help). I also hope to expose him to code in the process. My dad will help us get started, and answer any of my questions as I transition my Java knowledge to Javascript. We will then spread it to our friends and cousins in Greece, and see what happens. If we can inspire even a single kid to code with “Bowling Ball” and “Sapphire”, I will consider this project a success. We will be starting (once again with an idea from my brother) with a minesweeper game. He bugged my dad about it a couple of weeks ago and they have the basic skeleton done. I will need to fix the bugs and publish. I’m excited to see how the animation goes too!