Month: December 2013

The boy’s favorite Christmas present is his laptop. It’s not a toy laptop loaded with educational games. It’s the real deal laptop, with a 64-bit Intel processor and 150GB of disk space. Size wise, it’s a netbook so it’s just right for him to set on his lap and peck away at. Best of all, it has Ubuntu installed on it.

The only thing I don’t like about it is the Unity UI. Bleck. But then, I’m not a big fan of UI’s like that. Extended Linux exposure will do that to a user.

The reason he got that kind of rig is because of his desire to learn to program. It’s hard to justify anything else for a kid other than a Linux box since tools, debuggers, editors, IDE’s and any language the prospective programmer could possibly want to work worth are readily available at no charge. If this machine had not been available I’d have converted some other machine, probably a chromebook, as I saw fit.

So he’s enthusiastically resumed his programming activities. In addition to the laptop, he received a “programming for kids” book on python. I was somewhat amused to see that the book’s approach was similar to my own. Namely, introduce him to the language and so forth and build up his ability to write programs.

I’ve come to realize this is a completely inappropriate way to teach a kid like the boy. He needs to see a program actually do something. He doesn’t care about variables and tuples and functions or object-oriented and classes and constructors or closures. He wants to see a ball bounce on a screen.

The book has a couple of simple games it helps the prospective programmer write. It takes the approach of building up the knowledge bit-by-bit until there’s a functionally complete program. Naturally, the boy skipped all that and went right to the part where the whole program is laid out. It’s a “bounce” program, a simple version of the game “Pong.”

I’ll admit to not initially being thrilled with his approach. But, there are plenty of programmers out there that have cut there teeth by reading code and learning how it worked that way. There’s no reason the boy can’t be one of those if he chooses. Most importantly, he was willing to work through it. He did try to see if I’d be willing copy it for him, since I “could do it faster.” I scoffed at the notion though, “I can’t learn how to program for you.”

I did have an “I told you so.” After he’d started writing the code, I told him he would have to debug the program. First, there were bound to be typos in his code and those would cause syntax errors he’d have to work through. Then, there would likely be some lines he missed, or mistyped so the program would fail at strange points. Thankfully, there was only 80 lines of code or so, so debugging it wouldn’t be to difficult a task.

Forty-five minutes later, he’d finished typing it and tried to run it. It puked.

So I helped him fix that mistake. “Do you think it will run this time?” he asked hopefully.

“No.”

And it didn’t. It didn’t run on the third try either. Or the fourth. Or the fifth.

To his credit, the boy maintained his patience. It was obvious he was in that excited state a programmer attains when their program is about to ready to take flight. It maintained his focus.

After we fixed the syntax errors, we finally got a screen to pop up. But it still wasn’t running. Once more, we slowly brought his little program to life. First a paddle appeared on the bottom of the screen. Then a ball appeared above it. Shortly after that, the ball started bouncing around and the game was working.

Through all of it, I tried to explain what was wrong so he’d learn something for the next time. For many of the errors, he’d have needed a better understanding of programming to solve. Regardless of whatever I tried to offer him though, his main motivation was to see it run.

When finally it worked, the boy was beside himself with joy. Literally, a smile from ear to ear. Here was a game that he had “created” and written on his computer that he could actually sit and play.

Since then, he’s gone back and started trying to do other things. Last I saw, he was trying to draw circles on the screen. Hopefully this little success breeds more. Perhaps the thing to look for is a book with various programs for him to copy and play with.

The main thing is he’s off an running.

The boy was working on a last minute gift for the Wife. He’d already picked out a couple of presents, but he wanted to make her something as well. So, he set to work on one of those rubber band bracelets that seems to have taken the world by storm. Perhaps its just our world, but for all intents and purposes, it’s the world.

He came home one day a couple months ago and was weaving these these rubber bands together with his fingers. He said a friend had shown him how to do it at school. Soon after that, the Wife had purchased a supply of rubber bands for making the bracelets and he and the lass would sit and string them together. Shortly after that, he got a “loom” for making even fancier patterns. Then we were seeing all the kids making the dang things. Since then, both kids have mastered several patterns and designs and will sit and work on them when the mood strikes them.

So the boy had worked out a hybrid design involving a “hex-a-fish” and a “star-burst” design together and was working on joining the two halves together. That’s when “disaster” struck. Remember, when you’re a kid, everything that doesn’t go exactly, perfectly, as expected is a disaster.

The boy, naturally, responded appropriately.

He grabbed the bracelet he’d been working on and threw it across the room. Then yelled about how the world isn’t fair and everything always goes wrong right at the end when everything is almost done.

The Wife and I both tried to calm him a bit, but it was little use. He was cranked up and needed to be distracted from it. He stomped upstairs to go beat up his bed, or something.

I then had an idea.

I went up after him and asked him to join me for a moment. We walked over to a book shelf I’d made for the Wife and I pointed to some inlay work I’d done on it. It was a straight line of alternating darker wood set into a piece of maple. The accent gave the book shelf a little bit of character that it otherwise would have lacked.

It also never would have been there if I hadn’t messed up while building the bookshelf. I’d cut a groove on the wrong side of that piece of wood. I was upset when I’d done it, but rather than hurl the piece across the yard and destroy the garage to vent my rage, I walked away from it. I showed it to the Wife a bit later and she came up with the idea for the inlay.

So I explained all this to the boy. I set it up by asking him if what he thought of that little bit of inlay and then went on to explain how it ended up there. I even concluded the entire thing with a nice pithy “And the only reason it’s there is because of a mistake,” which, given the circumstances, I thought was a nice way to try and give him a different perspective on his own situation.

I was feeling pretty good about myself at that point. It was just like the movies where the young child is imparted with some useful life wisdom by his parent and everyone walks away happy and better. Roll credits.

Yeah, right.

The boy, seeing I was done, got up and walked back to his room to continue doing whatever it was he’d been doing. I sat there for a moment, admittedly disappointed. I already knew life kids don’t accept these sorts of lessons quite so neatly and cleanly as we parents would like. But I’d hoped this would at least get some kind of reaction. Alas, it was not meant to be.

Some days it seems just about anything is enough to make the boy mad. It could be a project that he’d been quietly working on. He’ll come to a point where something will go wrong and he can’t solve it. His frustration quickly boils over to anger and it’s all he can do not to completely destroy the project.

It can be his homework. Lo be the problem that he doesn’t quite get and causes him to begin erupting in fits of furious erasing and a willingness to throw his homework into the fire.

It can be a request to help. If he feels like it’s unfair (usually because he thinks he’s being asked more than his sister, or some variation thereof) he quickly turns into an angry little hornet. The request could even be something that is regularly asked of him, but for some reason he’s deemed it an unsuitable moment to be asked this particular time.

His temper is one of the white-hot varieties. He makes no bones about the fact that he’s mad. It’s not uncommon for him to be willing to destroy something that he’ll likely regret doing so. Sometimes his anger is directed at himself and he becomes his own worst critic, thinking he should have dealt with something better or solved something quicker.

More and more, I try to respond to his anger with rationale and logic, or just a calmness to offset his own boiling emotions. That balance can be tricky though, since he’s not the only one in the house with a temper. I’ve, regretfully, let it slip on a number of occasions where we’ve ended up going head-to-head. I say regretfully because I don’t think it’s a good example to set for him and, unfortunately, I think those are the moments that leave a bigger footprint.

I suspect this is one of those traits he’ll have to spend time working on to curb as he gets older. For now though, he doesn’t have the resources to reign himself in and the Wife and I have to figure out ways to defuse him. Time will tell how big a problem it becomes for him.

The kids had a half-day today because of parent-teacher conferences at the school. I took the opportunity to cut cord wood. Let me just say that cutting, splitting and stacking cord wood in 20 degree weather is much harder than doing it in warmer weather. In fact, I’ve concluded I erred pretty badly in waiting for the cooler weather to come before starting in on the cord wood. For one, when fingers get cold, there is no way to warm them up and they just hurt. For two, there is no oxygen in 20 degree air. I was exhausted after an hour of work today. Finally, sweat freezes.

The kids arrived home while I was toiling away. I cam in for a quick break and the boy was holed up on the couch reading, while the lass was working on a paper. I went back out and decided to ask the boy for some help stacking what was left of the wood I’d split. He did so and together we finished up the project.

Shortly after that, we both went inside and the boy resumed his perch on the couch. I went to go shower up and noted that he was staring off into space as I headed upstairs.

When I came back down 15 minutes later, he was fast asleep. In the same position I’d left him in, just his eyes were closed. I can even imagine what he must of thought, “Hmm, eyelids heavy, I’ll just let them …. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ”

And there he remained for about 3 hours. So either he’s a bit sick and fighting something off or he’s going to wake up 4 inches taller tomorrow.