I have always disliked those rather predictable coding courses that start with a “Hello World” exercise: especially as nobody in the real world ever says “Hello World” except, possibly, cult leaders.

That’s why when I decided to teach children to code, I followed my intuitions based on how I taught myself HyperCard, MetaCard, and LiveCode and based on my experience of working with primary school level children.

I have felt, for about 25 years, that the education system in Bulgaria, where I live, only serves to kill children’s imaginations and suppress their inherent creativity, while filling their heads with dry ‘facts’ that have little or no utility in the world we live. So I didn’t want to give them “Hello World”, but rather a kick in the mental pants to be part of the modern world instead of languishing under the weight of a dead 19th century education system.

I wanted to use lessons in LiveCode programming to move children from the Convergent Directed Learning model of education (i.e. educational force-feeding) to a Divergent Self-Directed Learning way of operating where children can learn by exploring for themselves. LiveCode lends itself to this sort of learning. I know, because that is exactly how I have learnt to program using LiveCode; always having the experiences of learning Fortran IV and PASCAL V in my past as points of comparison.

To teach the children, I started by making models of simple programming activities such as mathematical operations using beans and cups on the Harkness table I have in my classroom.

I then showed children how to make prototypes of those models in LiveCode itself.

When the children started suggesting improvements and correcting me when they saw me making on-screen errors in coding while I was demonstrating to them, I knew we’d made a breakthrough.

Now I have happy children who can reason their way through problems which their standard education system does not prepare them for.

I also take great personal satisfaction in seeing children who are incredibly happy at achieving so much so quickly.

I’m also pleased that several other people, both in Bulgaria and abroad, are following along with my course via the Facebook page that I set up for it. That is really super.

The advice I would give to anyone who wants to learn or who is only starting to learn to code is: I didn’t learn to drive a car until I was about 32 because I was scared. I felt like a complete fool after I learnt. Don’t be like me with computer programming: just dive in and get on.

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