This isn’t advice, but I’d like to share what I did to get my daughter interested in coding. Like any parent, I showed her all sorts of things to learn coding at a young age, it was zero curiosity. After a while I couldn’t understand why I had done this, I just put it on the shelf and let her do whatever she wanted, I just watched and expected her to ask for something. She said she wanted to write and draw on the walls of her room, I said yes, you can, on the other hand I was thinking about the price of repainting the walls. But anyway.

Then, while I was playing a game on my Nintendo, the good questions came. “Are you playing this thing?”, “Can it jump?”, “Can you change its clothes?”, “Does it have this function?”… That was a good point to start showing her something about coding. I started by showing her how to play Minecraft and Animal Crossing. She played the games in creative mode for a while. Even though what she can do in these games is very broad, she felt restricted in some places. For example, even though there was no cooking feature in Animal Crossing in the past, she thought she could put things in the fridge and cook with them.

Then the expected question came. She said, “How are these features added to this game, can I add them too?” I explained that it is not so easy, but there are ways to do it. First of all, you have to learn how to code, design, use programmes… In the meantime, she had already digitised her drawing on her own, using applications thanks to her tablet and pen, drawing what she wanted to do in the game, adding simple animations, even video and voice-over. But again, she realised that something was missing.

Her eyes were used to coding from my monitor since she was a baby. One day she came to me and said, “Dad, I want to code a game too. So I introduced her to Swift Playgrounds. We haven’t finished it yet, but I think she’ll be able to finish it when she has time from her homework.

The funny thing is that this is the same app, Swift Playgrounds, that I showed her a couple of years ago to teach her how to code bu she was disinterested. The second thing I would say is that I think code.org, Tinkercad, Scratch, it doesn’t matter. The first step should be to foster a sense of curiosity. Isn’t that how we started? If there’s no curiosity, I don’t think it’s a good idea to teach kids to code before they ask. Honestly, I didn’t want my dad to teach me his business when I was a kid.