How to Get Your Child Interested in Programming

My experience of how my daughter wrote her first game.

Oleksii Kosynskyi
JavaScript in Plain English
4 min readMay 19, 2022

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I have a daughter who is ten years old. She watched me all the time when I was programming. Therefore, I decided to try to engage her in the world of programming. Today I will share my experience of how my daughter wrote her first game.

Her journey started with the book “JavaScript for Kids.” We began to read one or two chapters a day slowly. We talked about data types and other topics she studied as we walked.

After the chapter, she had exciting tasks in the book, such as writing a “name-calling generator” or a game “find a treasure.” At the end of this book, she wrote the game “Snake”:

The book is over, but the desire to improve this snake remains. Therefore, I organized a full-fledged workflow for the child.
Firstly, I explained what Git is. I created an account on GitHub, and we made the first commit there. After that, we started a board with tasks on the “snake” project using Trello.

We’ve planning meetings at the breakfasts. Discuss tasks and bugs when walking in the evening and plan how to improve the game. So we’ve changed a lot of things. To begin with, I explained to the child what classes and inheritance are, and the first task was to rewrite the game into classes. It did not affect visually, but the code became cleaner and more structured. We wanted to play on a tablet, so we came up with arrow buttons that you can press and control the snake.

Added a Start button where you can start the level again if you lose

Oh yes, I didn’t say that my daughter loves to draw. And I suggested to her replace the colored squares with pictures that she would draw. And as a result, the game received a new look. Then we went on to invent further.

  • “Let’s make the levels background, snakeskin, and apple skin change like the natural seasons.”
  • “Let’s add sounds to the game.”

As a result, the snake took on a completely different look and became like an actual video game. It isn’t easy to describe the child’s feelings when she sees her drawing come to life.

Of course, I helped her. Setup CICD to deliver a fast new version of the game to the S3 bucket connected to CloudFront, making it possible to play on any device using the link and share it with friends. You can also try to play by using this link.

Conclusion

Now we continue to develop the game. And continue to learn HTML and CSS to create something interesting for her. With all this, I wanted to show the child what a programmer’s job is and how you can work on the project to develop and improve it. And also give her a lot of practical programming experience. We are also already thinking about what game to write next, so if you have any ideas, be sure to write in the comments.

All code is available on my daughter’s GitHub account.

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