Wisdom from Computer Coding

My current children's book-in-progress is requiring me to learn about a topic on which I hitherto knew nothing: coding.

I've written two books so far in my new chapter-book series, After-School Superstars. Each book takes place in a different month-long after-school "camp." Nixie Ness, Cooking Star is coming out in June of this year; I'm now working through the copy-edited manuscript for Vera Vance, Comics Star, which will be published in early 2020.

For the third book, I've been asked to feature a camp on coding. "Sure!" I said, even though I wasn't quite sure what coding was. I asked my younger son if he ever does any coding (he's a software engineer for a company in Chicago). "Mom! I do coding all day every day!" "Oh," I said. "I thought you did computer programming." "Mom! That's what coding is!"

So now I'm learning about coding. I attended two terrific "Hour of Code" workshops at Stott Elementary in Arvada, and I'm starting to attend some sessions of the Computer Club at Boulder Country Day School. I hauled home a big stack of books from the library, of which the two most helpful have been Coding for Kids: Create Your Own Videogames with Scratch and Helping Kids with Coding for Dummies (where I am surely the biggest dummy who will ever read it).

Here's what I've learned so far: Coding is fun! Kids adore it! At Stott Elementary the kids actually begged to be able to miss recess to keep on coding their "dance party."

The program you create either works, or it doesn't. If it works, it's a thrill. When his program finally worked, one boy kept shouting, "I'm a coding genius! I'm a complete genius!"

When it doesn't work, guess what? You can look at your program and figure out why it didn't work and fix it! As Megan (the brilliant teacher who ran the coding workshop at Stott), told her students, "Debugging is a huge part of coding. If something doesn't work, TRY SOMETHING ELSE." Ooh!!! That insight could be the heart of my book right there. Here's another great life lesson from Coding for Kids: "There is never just one possible solution to a problem!" Ooh!!! That insight could be my mantra as I wrestle with creating my plot.

I haven't actually tried coding myself yet... but I will soon. (Yikes!!!) What deep and important life truths will I discover in the process?