Hour of Code- at the SmartBoard

And this is Alexa, you can use it to order Legos!

There’s something really powerful about presenting to 5 year olds- you have to get their attention, and then you get 20 seconds to get your point across! I just completed my Hour of Code bit for the week, teaching a kindergarten class about “how to talk to computers”. We got through Ethan Gamer-TV, Roblox, MineCraft and how each of them teach us- secretly- to speak to machines. We then went through the machines themselves- I used Amazon Echo, Nest, a drone and Tesla as examples of how humans and machine interact.

What impressed me the most was how these kids see the world, machines, and the code that allows

Happy with the results- more Legos!

them to communicate. There is no fear of robots taking their jobs. There is no temptation to dismiss technology as “something I’ll never learn anyways”. It makes all the excuses we adults use seem so trite.  Seeing them solve problems and build little blocks of code, on the SmartBoard and on their own Macs, gave me great hope.

Once they understand, on the base level, that tech allows them to get what they want quicker, cheaper and in more interesting ways, they’re all in. Shouldn’t we all be a little more like that?