I wrote about the first application I built with Nesli before
We changed the previous application a bit and we’re very proud of the final product.
Dogfooding
Yesterday, during our morning routine when I woke up the kids to go to daycare/school Nesli (while still in bed) said she has an idea for another application and this time it’s a game to learn math.
We talked about the idea over breakfast and I told her to think about it for a day, see what she comes up with. I told her to think about the flow, how you get from screen to screen and what do you get when you’re right/wrong.
I intentionally left a lot open to interpretation and imagination.
I’ve been working as an engineer for over 12 years straight now and the term dogfooding (eating your own dog food) never seemed so alive to me. Nesli is taking her daily “problems” and solving it with apps. Now that she saw what we can do together it opened a whole new world to her and she’s thinking of solutions to problems. Being a first grader her problems sum up to math (Thank god).
Design
Today when she returned from school, after lunch we went into the garage and started sketching out the idea.
Not on paper
Intentionally, I didn’t give her a piece of paper and pencil. When you do things on paper with a pencil it kinda forces you to details that aren’t important right now.
When you sketch things on a whiteboards, you can’t go into detail, you just see flow. You have the attention to the big picture and not whether things are aligned or not.
This is something I started a long time ago and it helped me a lot, I’m glad I could pass it down to my daughter at such a young age.
Guiding, not dictating
This is her app, her stage, not mine. I was a bystander to the sketching process.
So, here’s the design
- Select Stage (1–6)
- Each stage represents a series of numbers (1=> 1–10, 2=>10–20 etc…)
- Once you choose your stage you are presented with a problem say 1+5 = ?
- You see 3 possible solutions (5, 6, 7) in random order
- You press the solution you think and you either get a great or oopsy (her terms)
We were distracted by building a bird house (real one, with wood, hammer and nail) so that’s all we got for today. More to come as we design and code more.
Streaming? Video?
Personally, I’ve been experimenting with streaming and recording my coding sessions (pairing or alone), I was thinking of doing the same with Nesli (if she agrees). I feel the process can be a great learning experience for a lot of people. What do you think? Would love to get some feedback on it
Stay tuned… more to come.
