I like stuff.

In my last post I said I am starting to teach Ruby to my daughter Rosey. So today after getting back home from watching Tangled in 3D we got started. She had done the first reading assignment last night (Preface, Intro, and Chapter 1 of Learn to Program). Our next step was to sit down and follow the instructions in Chapter 1, which was about installing and setting up the environment.

First I had to set some ground rules. Well, one ground rule:

Let’s stay on topic.

Kids always want to tell you random things. Unless they’re teenagers, of course, in which case I’m told they close off in their room for about four years. So I gave her a piece of paper and a pencil. If she thought of anything unrelated to programming that she was dying to tell me, she could write a reminder to herself on the paper and tell me later. I think it helped. At one point she was juuuuuuuuuuuuust about to tell me something but she caught herself and just wrote it down. I think having this release valve helped get the idea out of their head so she wouldn’t be distracted and could concentrate.

So, down to work. We installed Ruby on her laptop with the Ruby One-Click Installer. Yes, it’s her laptop even though we have three kids. Each kid has their own laptop. Refurbished corporate PCs are pretty cheap. And we installed Notepad++ too, since I love it.

Rosey had fun playing with the echo command on the command line, echoing everything I said. Having a computer do this is only slightly less annoying than having a person do it. Then she did this at the prompt:

C:\>:-)

And to our surprise, there was no error message. It just came back with another C: prompt. I guess that’s because in the Windows batch language a line that starts with a colon is a label—and you can put anything you want after it. Fun.

We finished Chapter 1 in a hurry and I was worried it wasn’t the best first day. Fortunately, she said yes when I asked if we could just do the first two paragraphs of Chapter 2 since I saw that’s where the instant gratification begins. She was hooked after this worked:

puts 1 + 2 # => 3

She experimented with some other math. I told her about * and / for times and divided by, and she did:

puts 300 / 8

but was surprised when the program printed 37 instead of 37.5. At that point I became pretty impressed with the order in which the book introduces new concepts, because I had read ahead and knew that the next page describes integers vs. floats, and goes on to explain why integer math always returns an integer. We read through it, typed in the examples, and were having fun. The book impressed me with its clairvoyance again when Rosey got tired of typing the spaces between the mathematical operators and asked if they are really needed. I showed her the next paragraph, which said “the spaces in the program are not important; they just make the code easier to read.”

Rosey also tried one of her favorite phrases:

puts I like pie

but she got an error message because she doesn’t know yet that strings have to be quoted. (The command-line echo command didn’t need them.) I decided not to bother explaining that for now, since the next chapter goes into it.

At one point the book said, “Don’t type commas into your numbers” because it just confuses Ruby. But I taught her a little-known Ruby trick, using underscores where you would have used commas. She’s learning ancient ninja secrets.

puts 1_000_000

I thought the exercises at the end of Chapter 2 would be hard. They ask the reader to solve problems like “How many hours are in a year?” and “How many seconds old are you?” It turned out they were a piece of cake. She raced through them, stopping only a few times to figure out whether to divide or multiply.

Next up: Rosey’s next reading assignment is Chapter 3, “Letters,” which talks about strings. Christmas vacation is over and school starts up tomorrow, so her homework will take precedence. But hopefully we’ll be able to keep the pace going and not lose steam.

So far so good!

This is installment #1 in a series of posts I will write about teaching my 11-almost-12-year-old daughter to program in Ruby.

In the last year I taught my daughter Rosey, who is 11 years old and in sixth grade, the basics of HTML. With help and training from me she made a few web pages with her own drawings, including some clever puzzles. We hand-coded all the pages instead of generating them with a drag-and-drop tool. That was her choice. (Hooray!)

She came away knowing some HTML. She knows it well enough to give a bit of an explanation to her friends, which I think is awesome. I tried to teach her a bit of CSS and JavaScript too. She may have had an inkling of how they work, but I didn’t do a very good job on those parts. I think it was mainly because I didn’t have a structured way to teach them. I admit I was pretty much all over the map. HTML was easy to teach tag by tag–start with <html>, <body>, <p>, and <img>. But with JavaScript to do anything useful on a website you have to go quickly past the basics and understand functions, the DOM, and more. I ended up writing the JavaScript myself and hoping she’d at least know it exists so she could come back some day.

Now it’s a new year, and next week she’ll turn 12. I asked her if she’d like to learn to program in a language that can actually make things happen instead of just show things on a page. Somehow I must have used just the right combination of excitement and pleading, because she said yes.

Very cool. I get to teach my daughter to write software! I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. Almost 12 years.

She already knows a couple of boys her age who have started learning to program but most of the boys have not. I’m excited that she will be ahead of a lot of the boys, since I hear one reason girls are sometimes behind in learning computer stuff is the intimidation factor: they take a class and see that most of the boys have already learned a lot of it on their own, so the girls feel like they’ll never catch up. I totally get that, and want to prevent it.

I Like Stuff that’s Ruby

Decision #1: what language to teach? I wanted to teach an interpreted language because interactive interpreters make learning easier. I primarily considered JavaScript and Ruby. I think they’re both great choices because (a) they’re both interpreted, (b) neither requires an immediate understanding of object-orientation, (c) I know them both really well and love them both, and (d) they’re actually useful.

I also considered “kid” languages like Scratch or Logo. But I’ve tried Scratch and honestly I didn’t get it. If I don’t get it, how am I going to teach it? I did learn Logo years ago and it was fun. But I was more excited about teaching JavaScript or Ruby.

A couple years ago while browsing the Programming section of Borders Books in Palo Alto I noticed Chris Pine’s book, Learn to Program, and wondered if it would be good for a middle-schooler. I read more about it, and found a review titled “Great for Kids.” The author is using Learn to Program to teach their 8-year-old daughter and loves it. Plus I learned that the author actually teaches programming to kids my daughter’s age. That’s good enough for me! So I got the book and will start teaching her to program.

(By the way, if you haven’t been to Border’s on University Ave. in Palo Alto, do yourself a favor and go inside. It’s cool. It was a beautiful, classic movie theater called The Varsity when I moved to downtown Palo Alto in 1988. Later they converted it to a bookstore but they kept the marquee.)

Lesson 1

So Today I went out and picked up the book. No way could I wait for an Amazon shipment. Then I read the Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 1. Then I asked her to start with the Preface and read for 20 minutes or so and stop wherever she is, or to finish Chapter 1 if she wants. She ended up stopping at the same spot as me. Tomorrow we’ll go over Chapter 1 together. It’s mostly just about installing Ruby and a text editor. But I’ll also go over some of the high-level concepts I remember being incredibly confusing to me when I first learned to program. Specifically:

• When I type a line of code into the computer, how should I think of this in comparison with an English sentence? Is it Declarative? Imperative? Something else? (Fortunately I think she has learned these terms in school. If she hasn’t, I can quickly describe the differences.) I think for a beginner the easiest explanation is that all lines of code are imperative. More specifically, you are telling the computer what to do. When you say “print 3″ it’s like telling someone else–someone who always follows orders–to print the number 3 on a piece of paper. Of course some computer programming statements are more like declarative, interrogative, or conditional statements. But the first thing a beginner learns is the imperatives like “print.” (I peeked ahead at Chapter 2 and it starts with “puts 1+2″.)
• What is the difference between RAM and the hard disk? How should I think of “saving” or “opening” a file? My daughter has saved documents before but I don’t think she quite groks RAM vs. disk yet.

Expectations

I enter this adventure with excitement and high hopes but also realistic expectations. She may get bored quickly or feel it’s too hard. I’m going to do my best to keep it light, fun, and low pressure. But if it doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal. You have to try things, right?

I will continue to blog about this adventure. Stay tuned right here on the I Like Stuff Blog.