Lesson 46 - Hour of Code

Yesterday we had the first public Koodikoulu (Code School) happening at Reaktor. There's a nice posting about that event in Reaktor blog here in Finnish.

That was also the day I discovered that Hour of Code has a huge collection of interactive programming tutorials. Check it out here yourself.

So today we played a cute game where you have to help Pixel the Puppy find back home. Practically it's a Scratch-based game where you have to make the correct sequence of Run and Jump commands to get to the goal. She loved it. It started with very simple things and ended up with ones where you have to use a couple of Repeat blocks, each of which is used to repeat a sequence of one or two Jumps or Runs. 

She mastered the easy ones where the solution is like (in Turtle Roy'ish notation)

  s [Run, Run, Jump]

or

  r 3 Run

But in the more complex ones she needed some help and retries. The most complex ones were like

  s [r 3 (s [Run, Jump]), Run]

She enjoyed it nevertheless and completed the 12-part tutorial in half-an-hour or so. And got a Certificate with her name on it! We saved it to her home directory.

And it wasn't enough. We wandered around and went to Scratch again and found out that she had created a program by herself a few weeks ago without telling me. Made me proud again.

Now she's working on another Hour of Code tutorial by herself. This one.

Oh, she got enough.

Nope. She's starting another one. Lightbot. It's quite fascinating to watch her play and learn.