You shouldn't assume....

....and when I say you, I mean me!  Yesterday, my friend, E, told me about how she and her children had had a go at the Hour of Code on Khan Academy.  She said that she and L, who is 8, in particular had really enjoyed it, but that her daughter, C, who's 10, had thought it was okay, but wasn't so keen.  I decided that I would suggest to K & M that we should have a look, but didn't think that it was really going to be their 'thing', or indeed mine particularly.  Boy, was I wrong!

We started off using my login, and the three of us watched together.  The vidoes are very cleverly done, with a commentary and a split screen, with the coding on one side and the shapes and pictures that the coding produced on the other, and you can pause the video and play around with the code and see the result, before continuing with the video.  Then there are some specific exercises to complete and finally a challenge to produce your own picture.  I did the exercises, with some input from the girls and then had a quick go at the final challenge.  I got really rather excited when I managed to put the star on the top of my Christmas tree!  I may well go back and do some more work on it, but K & M were impatient to have a go themselves.


My greetings card (so far).

As they were both so keen to get cracking, I got my laptop out for M while K went on the PC, and they each worked their way through the videos and exercises.  K had to go out for her ballet lesson, so although she has made a start on the final challenge, she hasn't finished yet.  M got rather frustrated at times and at one point thought she'd lost all her work, but fortunately she hadn't.  I did help a bit, particularly with the beard and smile, but she did the vast majority of it herself.

Another friend has recommended this site, which is where the Hour of Code comes from and I think we will certainly be exploring it.

In other news, we went to the library this morning and had a look at and a talk about a book on the subject of Fairtrade, which we've had out for a while and not got round to reading.  We didn't read it from cover to cover but I read parts of it and we discussed them.