Programming for Homeschoolers

My toes are barely in the water, and I can already tell this is going to be FUN.

I should tell you – I’m a software developer. You can read about that part of my life here.

Recently I started working with a friend’s teenage son who wants to learn to program. Ty is a tall, quiet guy who doesn’t say much… did I mention he keeps his thoughts to himself? And he is being homeschooled.

Anyway, Ty came over one day a couple of weeks ago and we spent maybe 45 minutes in front of a PC fiddling with Livecode. As we went along, I gave him just enough information so he could make sense of his experience. We created a new “stack” (a window) and just started plopping some controls onto it – a progress bar, a few check box buttons and some fields to be exact. Then an idea came. I enclosed the check boxes in a “group” control and wrote a few lines of code on a piece of paper, which Ty faithfully transcribed into the group script. The code made the progress bar grow or shrink with the number of boxes checked.

The end result: with less than an hour of programming experience, Ty had created a working “thing”. When he first realized the progress bar was moving in response to his clicking the check boxes, Ty – Mr. Fortress of Solitude – stared at the screen for a moment and then positively gushed, “That is so cool!” He couldn’t believe his eyes. He had just done his first programming!

It made my day.

This entry was posted in Homeschool, LiveCode, Programming, Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

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