Known Unknowns

Before my family had a computer, I knew I wanted to program. I told that story in an earlier post. I’d like my kids to learn to code as well–but they’re growing up in a world very different from that of my childhood, and I haven’t been sure how to recreate for them the empowerment that I felt. I think I’ve found one “magic bullet” entree to the game, and am sharing a brief review of it and of several other resources.

BitsBox

First–our first BitsBox arrived yesterday, and our kids (7 and 6) love it! The company delivers a highly-scaffolded programming environment. The first project has the child type in two lines of code to draw a monster on screen, and then have him burst into flame on a tap. And then, there’s a question: can you make the monster dance instead of burning? And the learning begins.

What I’ve loved about our kids’ interaction with BitsBox so far is they’re exploring. One didn’t like the music that came with the first assignment, so I helped her figure out how to play something else instead (choose a different name from the library and use the song function). Another wanted the monster in another assignment to say something besides “peekaboo”. She tried sound(“hi, you”), but there wasn’t a sound by that name. But, text(“hi, you”) worked to display a message!

Most learning comes from wanting to accomplish something, and then figuring out how to do it. I’m ecstatic that BitsBox seems to be facilitating this kind of learning in our kids!

I hope that BitsBox adds layers of complexity as it progresses, but for the moment, it’s lovely. It even allows kid coders to share their apps with other people, via email or QR code scan. It’s a monthly subscription, our kids are excited about it, and therefore I’m excited about it, for now. I don’t have an affiliate arrangement with them, so no kickbacks are involved in this review. 🙂

Note that both of our kids are proficient readers, and comfortable with the idea of keyboards (though still slow, hunt-and-peck typists). Those are likely prerequisites to enjoying BitsBox, as is the occasional (though not extensive) involvement of an adult “coach”.

Robot Turtles

We got the Robot Turtles board game a while ago. The basic idea is similar to the old “Logo” programming approach: you create a set of instructions for a turtle to follow on its way to the prize. Except, in this case, there’s an adult, the “Turtle Mover”, involved, who “executes” the instructions (potentially including loops and maybe other constructs), making suitable dramatic noises as the turtle turns, moves forward, activates lasers to blast through ice walls, etc.

Our daughters enjoyed this game. I loved the idea. But the “problem space” felt a bit too simplistic, and–I’ll admit it–the role of the Turtle Mover doesn’t get more interesting with time. It still, though, might be worth a try for you. The pieces are lovely, and our daughters enjoyed it.

Lightbot and Lightbot Jr.

This is a great little “puzzle” game for mobile. You give instructions to a robot, which then executes them to turn on all the lights in a “board”. The boards, of course, increase in complexity as you progress, and new options and coding constructs become available.

Links:

• Lightbot Jr. for Android
• Lightbot for Android
• Lightbot for iOS

Scratch and Scratch Jr.

These are free programs to let kids play with programming. Scratch Jr. is completely graphical; Scratch includes some text, with substantial graphical elements. They’re terrific environments for free-form programming. Our kids have played with Scratch Jr., but haven’t tapped much of the potential, and I haven’t been equipped to guide them. I have a book from No Starch Press on the way that I hope will help me with that. (They also have books on Scratch.)

Other resources

Khan Academy has a course in programming that uses JavaScript and graphics extensively. CodeCombat is a paid subscription that includes a lot of scaffolding. CodeWizards HQ appears to have actual online classes for kids in programming. I haven’t tried any of these.

If you search for “teach children programming” or “teach children Python”, you’ll find an abundance of resources.

Your recommendations?

If you have personal experience with other resources for teaching kids to code, I’d love to hear about them in comments!

Around the year 2000, I stopped listening to most contemporary Christian music. I’d enjoyed some of the upbeat rhythms, some of the sentiments…but I found myself listening to the most recent WOW collection and nauseated at the sugary, substanceless positivity that I heard. It wasn’t good Christian music. It wasn’t good art of any sort. It was a lie.

The story is told that Siddhartha Gautama grew up as a privileged prince, carefully isolated from the outside world to protect him from physical, mental, or emotional harm. But one day a funeral procession went by outside the palace, and he realized that a world of death existed outside. His ensuing grappling with suffering, we’re told, took him a long way from the palace and into reality, and produced the eightfold path of Buddhism.

The story is told in other forms. In Watership Down, the wanderers find a warren where everything is peaceful, there are no predators, and all eat well…but learn that scaffolding this peace was a maze of farmers’ snares, and a code of silence about them. The peace of the warren depended on it. In The Stepford Wives, a couple moves into an idyllic suburb. The charm and competence of their neighbors is delightful, and incredible…and then the cost becomes clear.

Ursula K. Le Guin, in her haunting fable The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, imagines a society of broad freedom, aesthetic delight, and human achievement, and of all those in it. (Search out the story and read it. Really.)

Hope nauseates me. Hope keeps me sane and alive.

Real hope begins with what is true–with the sadness, the horror, the fear, the pain, the injustice that are endemic to the world. And it somehow, often ridiculously, holds on to a belief that things can, that things may, get better. Somehow. Through one’s own actions, through outside factors, perhaps through both.

And there’s the other kind of hope, that is no hope at all. The “hope” of convincing oneself that nothing is wrong, and that no solutions are needed. The hope that tells the musicians in the palace to play more loudly as the funeral procession passes by outside. The hope that proffers weary and worn-through “spiritual” prescriptions to the starving of body or soul. The hope that tells others “be warmed and fed” and prays earnestly for their good, and goes on its way knowing that God is in control and all shall be well. The “hope” that rejects hope, for there is nothing to improve on and nothing to hope for, that constructs an inner idyll as it destroys the world around it.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

I see the shadows. I’m immersed in them, surrounded by them, even suffused by them. And yet, I act in hope. In hope that the flickering particle of light in me is real, that it might survive, might strengthen others, and that someday it will, somehow, be meaningful. And that the presence of shadows may indicate a light source–and that that possibility is worth everything. Worth survival, worth pain, worth kindness and integrity.

But don’t tell me that all is justice and peace, for there is no peace. If redemption comes, it will come for reality, not for fantasies. It will come for the hard edges of pain and truth, not for the spun candy of niceness. It will incinerate imagined worlds, leaving only the glowing gold of reality. It will come through people who know reality, and live in it.

I do believe in a metaphysical reality–but in that reality, a transcendent God chose to enter, and to submit to, reality as we know it, and worse than most of us know it. God chose to enter human life as a Jewish man under Roman occupation, to become a political victim both of Rome and of Judea, and to be tortured to death. And in Jesus’ death and resurrection (I realize I’m losing some people here, and perhaps gaining some back) and the inauguration of the Church, God’s metaphysical involvement with the world quickly returned to deep, empowered engagement in a very human and physical world. As one of the New Testament letters noted, “How can you say you love God, whom you can’t see, when you hate your brother, whom you can?”

Hope is real, or we are hopeless. What is real, hurts. Hope has hard edges.

Having recently moved back to the US, we’re re-engaging with America’s largest irrigated crop: the lawn. As with many issues, I find myself in inner conflict. I like the idea of having a nice, tidy green lawn of soft, cool grass where our daughters can play, without worrying overmuch about ticks and other beasties. But I hate the idea of pumping and pouring precious groundwater into something that’s not meant to grow here, of dumping chemicals on the ground purely for the sake of aesthetics, of being a contributor to the mass death of insects (and the threat that poses to the rest of the biome, including the species homo sapiens), of killing off all plant life except a certain species or two of grass in an area in the pursuit of some cultural ideal.

We’re hoping to pasture a few chickens on the lawn, using the ingenious Egg Cart’n “chicken tractor” as a movable coop–which offers an extra incentive to limit chemicals applied. (Disclosure: my father-in-law designed and sells these things. And they are ingenious.)

We have, perhaps, a quarter-acre plot (with power lines close by), which limits, for example, the ability to plant a forest in our backyard. We’ve dedicated a bit of the space to growing vegetables, using a variant of “Square Foot Gardening” (raised beds). I did end up “nuking” some big, solid patches of dandelions with glyphosate. We hope to experiment with planting some buffalo-grass plugs and over-seeding a drought-tolerant fescue, without chemically burning down most of the many weeds (and some grasses) we have in the lawn right now–for something of a grass-based lawn (if it “takes”) without going to extremes. We’ll till up one area and seed a “bed” with a mix of lots of wildflowers. May they be helpful to some pollinators and other insects. We’d like to plant some more bushes and small trees, ideally ones friendly to birds and maybe other small wildlife.

I recently found High Country Gardens, which looks like an awesome source for sustainable lawns and plants; they have some books I’m very much looking forward to reading. Their “lawn alternative” wildflower mix looks awesome…but a bit of a stretch for our small-ish backyard. Facebook’s “Healthy Yards” page offers helpful reminders in my feed. I’ve looked a bit at the Kansas Forestry Service’s website and trees-list, and a bit (esp. re. grasses) at KS Extension Service resources. But overall, I’m running on a dearth of knowledge, a dearth of energy to explore and learn, and with competing ideals of cultural aesthetic mandates (especially in a small town, vs. completely rural–but some of which are internalized) and of responsibly living on the earth.

I find nature deeply nourishing. I don’t spend a lot of time in nature. I like growing things. I don’t feel like I have huge amounts of time to invest in them. I want to minimize use of chemicals. I do use them somewhat, and prefer not to buy things branded “organic” or “non-GMO”. I dread the depletion of the aquifer under us…and I use a water softener, reverse-osmosis system, and irrigate my lawn. I love the idea of wild, emergent natural spaces, with an ecosystem sorting itself out. I live on a plot in a small town, and think about ticks or leeches (depending on the place) and poison ivy when I’m in woods or grasses. I enjoy, and shudder at, carefully manicured English gardens. I’m deeply refreshed at the oh-so-carefully-shaped wildness of Japanese gardens. I, um, have a few internal paradoxes.

What resources do you recommend for exploring the creation of “living spaces”, with both human living and the sphere of “life” of which we’re a small part in mind?

“One of the different questions adult development theory lets us ask is, “Who am I being right now and is that the person I want to be?” You bring that question into your everyday life and it moves you.”

-Jennifer Garvey Berger, in Farnam Street/Knowledge Project interview. Great discussion of the self-sovereign, socialized, self-authored, and self-transforming ways of being. In general, a great map of growth in life and decision-making.