I may have created a monster. It started off innocently enough. I wanted to teach my boy (who will be known as “The Ace”) a little about programming. He’s a tremendously creative kid. I thought he might get some enjoyment out of creating something like a website.
One of the great things about programming is the instant gratification you get. You write a little code and then get to try it out. That’s right up his alley.
So in the spirit of teaching him how to program, I picked up
Alice. You can download it for free at
http://www.alice.org. It’s a really wonderful system designed to teach object oriented programming to kids.
Well, the Ace used it for a bit and enjoyed it but it wasn’t what he wanted to do. He wanted to make a website. On a side note, his brother (The Deuce) LOVED playing with Alice. He had a lot of fun putting animals out and then controlling them with the mouse. Back to the Ace….
So to make a website, I first tried to have him use
Fireworks from
Adobe. That was going okay, but again, it’s not what he wanted. Plus, when he was using Fireworks, he was on MY computer! We can’t have that!! So instead, he is now on his own computer. It’s a Windows box and I have Visual Studio installed there.
Last night, we created an ASP.Net website. I taught him just enough Visual Basic so that he can click a button and get sent to another page. I also taught him how to write an IF/THEN block to check a password. It was 10:00 at night and he was still going strong. We had to pull him (literally crying) away to go to bed. When I woke him up this morning, his first words to me were “Can we work on my website after school?” Oh boy…
