My son sees me working from home from time-to-time. I sit there at my desk writing lines of code, mostly pretty mundane stuff like web forms. I can admit that there's nothing particularly exciting about it. But I showed my son what I was working on and he totally got turned off. I get that, but it still kinda hurt.
So, when I finally had a little down time, I decided to write something a little more interesting to him. What guy doesn't want to impress his kid?
I did a little planning and started attacking a "Tic-Tac-Toe" game - using only Vanilla JavaScript. It turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself.
It has logic and does what it is supposed to do. But I wanted a little more of a challenge... Something more interactive. A "Simon Says!" game seemed perfect for this. Once again, only using Vanilla JS.
There's a lot more I could do with these games, but if I do, it will be much later. (This stuff doesn't pay the bills, folks.) Either way, I had fun and my boy got to see that I am capable of more than "boring" work projects.
What have you done to impress your kids using your day job skills?
Top comments (8)
Not sure how old is your son but check this book in progress. My son and daughter think I'm a hacker because I use the terminal lol.
dev.to/kodaman2/tictactoe-unity3d-...
Forms are the worst.
My son is just impressed by keyboards and mice at this stage 😇. I'll teach him some Lua and maybe we can write a game, Lua is the perfect first language, also it's applicable to games the the youngsters play like Roblox and Garry's mod, all have some element of Lua scripting in game, very cool.
A friend of mine wrote a Pokémon battle clone from the Gameboy colour. Maybe that's the sort of thing you might want to try?
This feels like mumsnet haha.
Lua is a very easy language to pick up as its very basic and has few constraints, easy syntax as well as being a high level language which always helps...😁.
But i'd suggest python as a first language then lua but i suppose the younger generation would prefer lua as they can see their creations come to life in places such as Roblox Stufio 👍.
I followed the same path than you and tried the same things you are describing. The project that impressed a lot my two kids (6 & 3) was a unique screen of a platform game about an ogre jumping up to get the treasure. That's all and seems to be very simple but liked a lot.
I started writing plugins for Minecraft as he plays that. He didn't pick up on the coding, but he likes to give me ideas about what the end result will be.
I find more interacitve places like roblox studio work better for younger kids as they can visulize what is being created and to an extent (a limited extent) how.
I have found with my younger brother that he draws up ideas and i code them up with him as well as fun but simple things like flying by clicking q on a qwerty keyboard which he then and does the more visual stuff such as make the person where supermans clothes suddenly appear when q pressed.
(He's around 8 for reference.)
how about a raspberry pi or arduino or esp32 board based car, controlled from smartphone using bluetooth
I had similar experiences with the son of my girlfriend, he's 17 now. Two years ago for Christmas I made a pokemon quiz based on a public rest api, he liked that a lot better.