Anyway, what finally got me off my ass to make a post was a very touching evening I spent with my daughter.
It's already winter here in the Catskills. Snow has been flurrying all week, the ground is hard, the air is crisp, and at night, the stars blaze in a perfectly clear sky. So after dinner, Lucia and I cozied up by a roaring fire and I taught her HTML. (this was before the whole family gathered around the TV to watch the second installment of Brian Greene's "The Elegent Universe" on Nova. Yes, I think we qualify as a nerdy family).
Anyway, this is what she created (with my help), excerpted for blogger compatibilty:
hello 
homeschooling is the best and schools are the worst
The blonde one is Lucia, for those who don't know us, she is 8 and dropped out of school after kindergarten. We haven't looked back since.
The source:
| <html> | |
| <head> | |
| <script language="javascript"> | |
| function clickMe(){ | |
| var value = document.getElementById("lunick").value; | |
| alert(value); | |
| }; | |
| </script> | |
| </head> | |
| <body bgcolor="red"> | |
| <a href="http://luciastories.blogspot.com/"> hello | |
| <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNYANfJxkyvTwLgTMuFtEWOOX71Lqwm6AKYKetLnJ4kckoZRF6ICyrjQ2CYIC9vbBsvz4yU6wv9Q4OAFas3EXVW9rZoBEPybYsTZe5v6vCmcAMJK6G9G4dfOUcOXOWtie3QjID0KI7YBPc/s400/Photo+6.jpg"></a> | |
| <input id="lunick" type="text"></input> | |
| <button onclick="clickMe();">lucia</button> | |
| <p style="font-size:30px;font-style:italic;color:blue;"> | |
| homeschooling is the best and schools are the worst | |
| </p> | |
| </body> | |
| </html> |
I started with explaining how when you go to a website, your computer calls another computer up, and that computer gives your computer a document, which the browser reads and uses as instructions to draw the page. Those instructions may look funny at first but we can look at them and read them ourselves.
Personally, I think the above is probably the most important thing about the web. I certainly would never have been drawn back to computers after an awkward start with BASIC and LOGO as a child if it wasn't for View Source culture. I had to hold back the tears as I showed Lucia how you can right click on any webpage select "View Source" and see how its put together.
Obviosuly, I am not going to keep an 8 year old's attention going with lofty waxing on the beauty of http, so I quickly moved on to tags. I knew I would start with the <img/> tag, which has immediate gratification and introduces URLs and then move to the all important <a> tag. From there we went to text, then forms and some simple javascript, touching on the nature of data and functions. We then started a choose your own adventure type program, I'll let you know when its in beta.
Reflecting on this later, I realize that the most important thing for me was that Lucia really got something positive about what I do. Since I started working from home full time in June, it has really been underscored for me just how archane and bizarre my job is to the rest of my family - and especially my daughter. Tonight, she got to experience software as a creative act. And it was a good reminder for me too that software development is not just answering email, writing documents, conference calls, and all matter of other things kids intuitively hate, it can be about things kids inherently love: invention, creativity, and play.
