Monday, December 30, 2013

Learn to program with Kahn Academy

The following post is from my thirteen-year-old daughter.

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Some of the things I enjoy most about home schooling are flexibility and opportunity.

Recently, I have been taking advantage of these and working through some of the Khan Academy programming lessons. By watching Khan Academy videos on programming and using their workshops I now have a better understanding of how computers work, and what programming is all about. I have also been able to try my hand writing programs, with some coaching from my Dad.

As a homeschooler it is natural to turn to my father, who is a programmer, for help. We have had a couple sessions which were both educational and fun.

Kahn Academy is free, but to use it you'll have to create an account.  Once you have created an account go to their Computer programming page to get started.

I like to play with it.  It is a lot of fun.  They tell you step by step how to do things.  They'll guide you into the basics of programming. 

Here is a pretty simple program I created which draws red circles as you move the mouse and creates a blue square when you click the mouse:

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var mouseMoved = function(){
  fill(255, 0, 0);
    ellipse(mouseX, mouseY, 30, 30);
    noFill();
};

var mousePressed = function(){
    fill(0, 13, 255);
    rect(mouseX, mouseY, 40, 40);
    noFill();
};

background(231, 235, 14);


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You can copy and paste the above program into the Khan Academy new page.

I now want to learn how to make apps!

3 comments:

Annie Kate said...

So cool! Thanks for sharing! My 13 year old is using KidCoder, but this looks like fun too.

Anonymous said...

Do you think a ten year old could handle this?

Henry Cate said...

I think it depends on the ten-year-old. My suggestion is an adult sit down with him and help him get started.