The Children Are Our Future

Number Two son (age 8) comes in to report that Number One son (age 10) is calling him stupid!

Number One son comes in holding a piece of paper:

Contributing to the NERDliness of a Minor

Two minors, actually. A few months ago, I caved in to demands of my oldest two boys (10 and 8) to play D&D. They made me be the DM and they loved it. I did not really love it for several reasons:

1. Never played before. Any halfway game is annoying the first few times as you learn The System and what is and isn't important, etc.
2. Takes a lot of time to set up.
3. I feel like a real dork saying things like "leathern helm" or "dwarf mage".

So I didn't do it again. But that didn't make the demands stop. Finally, I told the 10 year old that I would play with them if he was the DM. Last night, we started that game.

Which brings me to the nerdliness. Playing D&D. Around the dining room table. While eating pizza, hot dogs and nachos. At least none of us has a neckbeard or obesity problem. Although one of us runs Linux. Oh and Mom brought in a sugary snack, plus we had our first game-based injoke.

Anyway, he actually did really, really well at it. I mean, we're wandering around without a clue in a very haphazard dungeon and he's giving hints pretty often ("do you want to check behind you?")...but he has the right attitude. He's confidently telling us what's what and taking our unanticipated actions completely in stride. Kudos, proto-NERD!

Wooo

• I cracked 50 lb of weight loss today. I'm still on track (±ε) to reach my original goal by Christmas. It also happens to be, as of yesterday, 10 lbs in 100 days, or almost exactly 350 calories/day.
• Pursuant to that, I have made a breakthrough in food reduction technology. One of my favorite meals is...undocumented on this site?! WHAT. Anyway, it involves guacamole. The problem I've had is that I need to make enough to use up an entire avocado, which now that my metamabolism needs fewer calories is a little too much. Avocado turns brown if you look at it funny, so I can't put the excess in the fridge. I also can't throw it away because of the starving children in Africa. However, it turns out to freeze just fine. So now I can make M/Nths of a recipe which not only vastly reduces the hit points but also means I only use M avocados every N days.
• I'm trying to embed a microcontroller into a project that I'll describe more later. All I know is Arduino, so I'm going with that. (I guess I could just use the Atmega chip or however that works, but baby steps, people.) The basic Arduino is a little unwieldy for this, but last night I finished soldering and testing the Really Bare Bones Board. And besides being much smaller and breadboard-compatible, it's also much cheaper because it pushes some of the cost of the unit into a one-time-purchase cable.
• Number One Son, age 9, is trollering me. He just found out about HTML and has made a couple of pages. (With random size changes and font colors, naturally.) He keeps calling the .html file a "program".

Speaking Of Things That Don't Work

My house is crammed with computers, but only two of them (mine and Mrs Username's) are connected to the internet. Which means the kids always want to use them to play games.

The basement is wired, so last night I finally got around to hooking one up. It's got some version of Windows on there and already has a network card, so it should be easy, right? Drivers?? I don't even know what the card is! Not to mention the fact that I'm not too comfortable putting a Windows machine on the internet.

Then I get a crazy idea: I'll make it dual boot Ubuntu¹! Takes me 45 minutes to download the latest disc, i.e. less time than it would have to identify, locate, download and install a NIC driver. Completely easy to install: Other than the fact that I had to adjust a slider to say how much room to leave for the existing Windows partition, I didn't have to tell it anything at all. It even got on the internet all by itself to download updates.

The question is: Is making my kids dual boot into Linux to play games child abuse or child undangerment? Either way, it certainly builds character.

¹Actually, Xubuntu, because this is an older machine. I considered Edubuntu, but I think I'll go with the small, fast one and then add kid-oriented packages.

You Program My Back, I'll Program Yours

If you are a math/science/computer nerd and you have a child, you have undoubtedly wondered how you can teach your child programming. I googled for such a thing more than once and found the usual suspects: BASIC, LOGO, etc, etc. The free ones were all half-finished or too hard, the good ones were all expensive or geared towards classrooms.

I tried teaching Number One Son (8 years old) some pseudo-codey stuff to do simple math problems and learn about loops. He enjoyed that, but we didn't get very far and I always had to be the virtual machine to check if his program ran.

However, MIT has recently come up with something that absolutely rules--Scratch. And it's free!

Scratch is graphical. You drag the little components around to assemble a program. For instance, to make a loop, you drag your components into a loop widget, which wraps around it like a vice. If you want to construct a conditional, you get out the "if" widget and drag and drop logical/mathematical conditions in from the toolbox. Just fill in the blanks and go.

The GUI isn't just for show, either. You don't feel like you are using the mouse to write a program, you feel like you are literally assembling a physical object. And it eliminates syntax errors, which is a major deal in the under-13 crowd. Furthermore, the graphical programming language ties right in to the very graphics-oriented programs Scratch is targeted towards and children love. Creating and animating sprites takes just a few clicks. Object collision is just a matter of checking if two colors are touching. And this is all clearly presented enough that an 8 year old can (and has) figured most of it out himself.

I think he learned more about programming in 2 days with Scratch than he did in all the previous years of my bumbling explanations. He goes off and works on a program for a while and then will come to me with a question about how to do something. And they are pretty sophisticated problems (considering his age), such as how to cycle through sprite costumes and wraparound at the end or how to keep various sprites in sync. With the concrete example of his non-working program providing the motivation, the explanations of modular arithmetic or semaphores stick much better.

So far he's created programs that simulate a robot in a maze, animate a rocket flying to the moon, teach the alphabet to his two-year-old sibling and even one generic drawing program with adjustable pen size and color. All 100% on his own.

Windows and Mac only, but:

1. They claim they'll have a Linux version out "before the end of 2007".
2. The usefulness, fun and polish of Scratch is more than worth setting up an old PC with Windows.

It's possible to upload your program to share with other kids, but we haven't tried that yet. Videos of Scratch in action..