Twin Cities Code Camp

If you are going to code camp, you likely know how valuable programming skills are, and perhaps you one day want your kids to learn these skills too. Programming teaches kids many valuable lessons: how to think logically and rationally, how to plan ahead, how to problem solve, and how to swear properly. But how do we teach kids to program today? When we were kids we were ecstatic to see a green blinking cursor on the screen prompting us to type our name so we could have the program print it repeatedly on the page while(true). How do we get today’s kids with XBoxes and Nintendos interested in rudimentary programming of “if” statements? In this session Tommy Davis (age 9) and his dad Scott will discuss four programming languages and how they work for kids: Scratch, Lego Mindstorms, Python, and C#. We will demonstrate each language and talk about Tom’s experience in each, what worked well and what didn’t, and what approaches you might take to get your own kids into programming. Tommy attended his first Twin Cities Code Camp last fall, where he showed off the Windows Phone game he had made before coming to the conference as the youngest programmer in attendance.