Go Candy Robot!

Today I visited the Koodikerho (Code Club) at a local school in Espoo, Finland, hosted by Marko Klemetti from Eficode. Marko has been doing these code clubs for some time already and it shows! He has a really nice relationship and a laid-back attitude with the 3rd to 6th graders attending the club.

There were two 45 minute sessions, one for the 3rd / 4th graders and one for the 5th / 6th graders. For the younger ones we did a Candy Robot exercise, where the kids write down instructions for the Candy Robot that has to pick and sort candies from a bag into 4 cups. If it succeeds to place 2 candies in each cup, the kids get the candy. The challenge is that the robot only understands a very limited number of commands and takes everything literally.

The Candy Robot exercise worked extremely well. It took 2-5 iteration for each team of kids to get to the correct solution so that they can eat candy and play with iPads. It was fun and taught the basics of programming quite well.

With the 5th / 6th graders we started the Codecademy Javascript program on which I have mixed feelings. On the other hand, it teaches a language that's really relevant today; it's the language of the Web. However, the Javascript program on Codecademy is in English only and has quite verbose text sections that are tough especially for the 5th graders. Also, I think it's a bit boring. Nevertheless, the kids did surprisingly fine. It was really tough, but they mostly kept focused and asked a lot of good questions. I hope this builds their skills faster than it kills the joy in programming :) Soon enough, they should be able to build their own programs in Javascript.

Later today, I tried the Candy Robot exercise with my 5-year-old at home. Not surprisingly it was a lot tougher for her and she required a lot more help than the kids at school. For a while she got frustrated but eventually, with enough help, she came up with a working program. Maybe I should have used real candy with her too, instead of the Hama beads...

Her program looked like this, before we gave up on actually writing everything down.

But what really made the night for us was the exciting game of Go, which was the first one for her. I only gave her easy time for the very beginning of the game until I discovered that she'll kick my ass. She was brilliant and ruthless and took no prisoners.