How Teaching Kids to Code Made Me a Better Developer
summary
Runs an after-school game programming class using Gosu gem and Ruby for one hour a week over several years; projects include a space shooter where kids set asteroid speed (sometimes up to 50,000 enemies), platformers and text adventures. Teaching produces tiny array drills that become contests, forces more verbose readable code, and surfaces pair programming as the default debugging workflow. Outcome: messy but working student games, faster learning and real confidence gains.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (6)
- 0:00Start
- 5:55Space Adventure
- 11:15Tiny Exercises
- 12:06Simplicity
- 13:27Showing and Reading Code
- 17:08Start a Coding Group for Kids
related talks
22mHow teaching kids to code made me a better developer
31mProgramming in the Small - Teaching my 5 Year Old Ruby
32mRuby: The Next Generation
33mWriting Games with Ruby
16mHow My Dad Taught Me to Code
39mIndoctrinating the Next Generation: Teaching Ruby to Kids
30mLessons Learned: A Developer's Perspective on Teaching & Learning
51mWriting Games with Ruby