After taking a long break from the last lesson, today, I’ve asked Anika again, “What is a programming language?” and she responded correctly that it is something that let’s you tell the computer what to do.
Inspired by the fact that she still remembers and also that she actually asked me to let her do some “programming”, I fired up Chipmunk BASIC on the Mac and showed her a line of instruction to let the computer “say” what you want it to say. I have shown her this in the previous lesson to give her a feel of what is involved to write a code.
This is in the form of
print "whatever"
She picks up pretty quickly.
We have to note that Anika is just starting to learn how to spell and write. So basic things like the word print, she would have to think it up in her head, sound it out and translate it to the keys on the keyboard. She also was struggling with the double quotes but after I’ve taught her how to use the delete/backspace key, she easily corrected the common mistake of using a single quote instead of a double quote or entering multiple single quotes.
Initially I started with a lot of prompting to guide her (after the first demo I did to show her how to do it). Slowly I allowed her to do it all by herself. The end result (final try) was captured in the video below.