Hello Ruby!

A while ago we got mail.

The long-awaited Hello Ruby book by Linda Liukas arrived! We read it as a good-night story the same night and both the girls (6 and 3 years) seemed to love it. Even with about 60 pages of story, it was an easy and quick read and even the 3-year old was all ears and had no problem concentrating. 

I was expecting a bit more "programming" in the story though. There are references to algorithmic thinking (Ruby thinks like a programmer), but without extra explaining, the kids won't notice that. The references to Python, Django, Snowleopard, Androids et al are also cute but don't ring any bells to small kids. Not sure that it makes sense to add that kind of a layer on the story.

Nevertheless, the most fun part in the book are the excercises though. From page 65 or so starts a "workbook" (not sure about the wording as my book's in Finnish) section, which is a real treasure chest full of fun and graphical programming exercises that you can do without a computer. This is the section that makes the book twice worth its price even if there wasn't a story at all!

Working on the 1st exercise

The exercises may seem simplistic, but at least for my quite-a-bit experienced 6-year old coder girl, they were just perfect. Easy and fun. We covered the first three exercises in half an hour or so. The first exercise was about writing written instructions for stuff like eating breakfast. Below there are the 6-year old's instructions. She even managed to make a loop to make sure that all the oatmeal gets eaten. She wasn't sure how you make a loop in this Finnish pseudo-language, and asked me how to "make a repeat" in Finnish, as she didn't know the right "coding words" in her mother tongue.

The exercises involve not just writing step-by-step procedures, but also breaking things into parts, boolean logic and so on. As an extra, she got to draw Ruby in her weekend costume, the rules of which she had to write in exercise three. You can probably guess the rules from the picture?

And how about the 3-year old? She was busy too, and also drew a picture of Ruby.

Ruby pictured by 3-year old artist

So, Ruby is not just cute, but smart too. Well done, Linda!