I gave a talk at Resonate ‘15 about teaching code to secondary school children (ages 10-18).

The aim of the talk was to encourage ‘creative coders’ to teach children to code, because I believe they are particularly well suited to the task given their usual interests and backgrounds.

I did this by briefly covering two projects I’ve used succesfully: drawing pizzas slice by slice, and building a Pokémon battle game, while explaining my choice of approach, material, and influences (Seymour Papert and less explicitly Bret Victor).

This was the starting point for a bigger question “Am I doing it wrong?”; touching on the influence of (programming) languages and tools on one’s thinking/creating, and the pros and cons of abstraction in the learning process.

In the talk I mention one of my ex-students Yaxlat and his great games, got to give him some props here: