The Rude Computer

[trickykitty]

While sitting at my parents' house Saturday watching a movie, Little Bit came into the room ecstatic that he managed to get the programming software to say his name. This meant that he learned how to capture user input, save it to a variable (of type String), and repeat it back in sentence form to the user. Admittedly, I would figure understanding variables would be the hardest part for a 10 year old, but this book is good at going slow for children. It doesn't worry about explaining bits and bytes and 1s and 0s and memory size. That's for later. Besides, he has a scientific mind and will naturally gravitate toward doing well in math and science, as well as programming, which is why I'm encouraging him forward in this, instead of waiting for the school to offer him classes on programming. Despite our original setback of QB64 not running on my laptop, he's taken to the book like a fish to water.

He then made a computer program that has a set of rude comments it randomly chooses to say to the user after the user has typed a line of text into the system and hit Enter. He subjected his older brother to it. That was mildly entertaining.

My goal next weekend is to look at his program and show him a couple spots where he can clean it up, like where he neglected to include the final space after a comma when repeating back the user's name. In other words, it currently looks like, "Hello,Nicole" instead of, "Hello, Nicole". It's those little things that I want to make sure he pays attention to and catches early on, although some of it can be chalked up to whether or not he's been taught proper punctuation in school yet, since even I don't recall focusing on that until middle school, and he's still in primary school.

I pointed out that he skipped an entire section that has another program he should work on (The Guessing Game), so I'm hoping he'll have that ready for me to play-test come this weekend as well. In his excitement, he only scanned through the book instead of reading it the day after I was present. I let him know that I think it's important to read everything in the book. While the author does throw in quite a lot of jokes, the information is important. Just copying code from the book into the program won't help him figure out how to make his own games in the future.

A little bit later after having that conversation with him, I saw him going back to where he and I left off together in the book and started actually reading the text again. I'm reading along and catching up to him when I'm there, which actually annoyed him slightly, not because I was reading, nor did he feel like I was following up on him like a teacher, but because for the whole 10min I had the book it meant he couldn't have it back in his room for himself. Ha, ha. I like that that was his gripe about it. He keeps asking me to sit with him while he programs, so I know he's perfectly fine with me keeping up with him. I'm going to have to bring in my 2nd laptop and work on my own programming while he works on his, just to keep myself awake.

Speaking of which, Dad wants a laptop now. This is the guy that spent the first 20 years of (me) having access to PCs and the Internet griping about how in the world people can spend so many hours with their faces glued to the monitors. I keep telling him that anything he could buy at Best Buy would work just fine for his purposes, since all he ever does is internet searching.

Now that I think about it, I should load Overdrive onto my Mom's tablet. She used to read tons of Harlequin romance novels, and some mystery romance novels, back in the day. I bet she'd enjoy getting back into that. Then she could have a book to read when we all go skating, instead of only having the Sudoku game on her tablet to occupy her.