Earlier today I tweeted the above image of five handwritten top tips from a seven year old female who had been learning programming; these were extremely astute observations and were a delight to read.
After digging a bit deeper, I found the original blog post, describing in more detail the poignant observations of @fjsteele‘s daughter after spending an hour using Hopscotch, a visual programming language for the iPad. In the blog post, he explains that this was his daughter’s first programming lesson and he asked her to write down instructions on how to draw a square, and then use Hopscotch to make one; after that, they tried a triangle:
It was fun to see the ‘lightbulb’ come on as she tried different blocks, failed, tried something else. It was really fun to watch her discover debugging. She quickly learned not to do too much work before testing it out.
Not a bad summary from an hour of programming! What else would you add to this list?
Tom
Great post this reminds me of a open letter written to the web development design industry which was read out at the handheld conference/sumit last year here is a recording:
http://vimeo.com/80718034
Wise words from an eight year old (HT Software Carpentry):