Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Hot Air Balloons

We were going to have a lesson today before bedtime but the girls were so tired that it would've been a disaster, so it's good we just discussed the subject while eating oatmeal.

She was very anxious about getting to write "proper" games instead of the boring text things. She said she's ready to do that already, and she doesn't want to write anymore. Just real games with pictures and all.

So I used some analogues. Like imagine you're a small baby who cannot even crawl yet and you want to learn to run. We went through the steps that have to been taken before learning to run. Still, she wanted to get to the business of writing real games. Then we discussed how cool that would be. She found it quite unbelievable that some people make games for living. What a cool job! But, alas, to make these games you have to write a lot of code. We agreed that I'll show her the amount of code required for our little Fairy Game. So, we'll have a code review on that shitty codebase probably tomorrow. I hope it convinces her that you cannot make graphic games without resorting to textual editing.

Once again, just before bedtime, she wanted to talk about Vim and computers. Once again, she remembered just one computer component, i.e. the hard disc.

She wanted to know how the keyboard works. We discussed electric circuits and how the key presses are converted into digital signals that the CPU then processes. And so on. 

She also wanted to know how the LCD panel works but I had to divert her to the fact that there are three colors of pixels on it and using a combination of RGB, you can make up any color. We agreed to try mixing those colors as a bonus after the next lesson.

And hot-air balloons. She wants to see how many people die when one of those lands.

2 comments:

  1. You have a great talent for reading and teaching/motivating small kids!

    I've tried to teach some command line stuff to my younger sisters, with limited success. I will hopefully be better at that when I have kids of my own.

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  2. Reading=writing. Seems like I'm not so good at the latter.

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