With finals season in fall swing a couple friends and I took a couple hours off today to do an hour of code with K-12 kids from South Central Los Angeles. I was paired up with an elementary schooler named Hunter, and we were supposed to be spending the evening working on an ipad doing some really basic programming on ScratchJr.
Now while Scratch Jr. does have a pretty intuitive interface, it ended up boring Hunter within a couple minutes. He even asked me why I would code on Scratch Jr. all day since it seemed really boring.
Seeing that I was losing him on the Scratch Jr, I decided to pivot and show him some of the projects I’ve been working on. We started off with a hangman game I had made in Java which utilized multi-threading and networking. I explained how all the games he played on his I-pad which were multiplayer used a similar set up - in a water down elementary school level way of course.
After seeing his excitement I then asked him if there were any games he liked playing. He said he really liked the game “snake.” So we spent a decent amount of time building the game in javascript.
The game of snake I coded with Hunter
After coding up the game of snake, and him going around the room showing it off to his friends. He asked me if we could create the game “Pong,” he had heard his dad talk about. So we went off and after a couple of google searches and keystrokes we had a working version of Pong going.
We made sure to have the ball colored in Cardinal and Gold, because GO USC colors!
After building out Pong, he asked me how he could build a game that would give him different recipes to help his mom out in the kitchen. So I got started working on my Virtual Machine, walking through the steps to code a recipe bot in C++ that could get recipes from a recipe API. We only got a couple minutes to work on it though, before Hunter had to go home (so its a project for another day for him)
But more importantly I had a lot of fun talking about what a CS student. Now while I seriously doubt Hunter will be able to program like a “hacker” as he calls it by tomorrow. I think that working through the projects with him, showed him how cool it is to be a CS major. When I first asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up he said a policeman for the LAPD. After the evening coding with him he now wants to be a "cyber policeman" for the NSA.