Everyone had a play date yesterday except for Grace. So when Char came home, they decided the two of them would ride their bikes to Huddles for some frozen yogurt. When they rang up the totals, there was a significant disparity in the cost between their cups.
Char said, “Grace, my gosh, my yogurt was only $2 and yours was $6.50.”
Grace looked at her cup of two flavors of frozen yogurt, topped with gummy bears, mini white chocolate chips, and Nerd candy and said, “Mom, I haven’t had candy for 40 days. Don’t judge me.”
Well, it’s Friday… another week gone by, another month in the history books, and another conversation about how hard it is to find people who can write programming code.
So it was in this spirit that Tom brought this video to my attention. It’s simply brilliant, and raises a question that has the potential to haunt us all in the future: If we don’t encourage our kids to learn to code, how will we find qualified people to fill the shortage of computer programmers?
Fortunately, there are some great resources available. Take a look at code.org for advice on helping your kids start the process of learning to create things with their hands, intelligence and problem solving skills . You can also find resources to help you teach, even if you’re learning yourself.
The MIT Medialab has created a really cool tool called Scratch, which teaches kids to learn programming basics in a web-based drag and drop environment. While being simple to use, it also helps them understand advanced concepts like variables and object-oriented code.
One more thing… If you know of anyone who is writing code and wants to be a part of a great team, send them our way.
Everyone had a play date yesterday except for Grace. So when Char came home, they decided the two of them would ride their bikes to Huddles for some frozen yogurt. When they rang up the totals, there was a significant disparity in the cost between their cups.