Comment by 1MachineElf
3 years ago
>And I am trying to make it like a 'scavenger hunt' experience for my daughter, I will put special codes in various places in the programs or on the file system with different difficulty, and I can challenge her to find them.
This is brilliant. I really admire the lengths you go to so that your kids can be engaged. Sounds like this has the potential to be quite fun and exciting.
I really enjoy finding new ways to introduce her into how computers think, in the same time, I have to constantly level up my game, as I am competing with tiktok, instagram, youtube, netflix.. etc. So I have to come up with new incentives, and more and more interesting projects, e.g. I printed a tshirt with some of her code, or made a huge poster with one of the turtle images she made (https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...), or sometimes its pure bribery, like buying robux.
When I was her age, I spent hours just reading random man pages, pretty much because cartoon network was showing the same episode of dexter's laboratory for the 25th time.
The kids her age are growing in a strange era, programs will control their life, wether they want it or not, so it will be great if they can debug :)
This brings me back to when I was ~5 and my grandpa built together with me kits for a simple light bulb, an electromagnet, and a simple crystal radio. It wasn't enough to get me consistently interested, but it put "dots" into my mind that I could later "connect" when I was older. The experience was invaluable.