The 8 Year Old Has Created His Own 6 Versions of Game
“I love the feeling of accomplishment after thousands of trials and errors. ” said by our top student, Huisheng Kim, who is currently studying Python.
Little Fans Living in L.A.
Our interview was set at 10 a.m. on the weekend, and in United States it was 7 o’clock at night. It was late and the connection went wrong time to time, yet Huisheng was still patiently waiting us, and in his tone we felt his excitement.
“He loves CODE.GAME so much”, his mother told us before interview. Indeed, during our interview, he couldn’t wait to tell us that the dream he wanted to realize now was to learn coding on CODE.GAME everyday.
Though Huisheng is such a huge fan of CODE.GAME, there are still some comments from him. “Currently CODE.GAME is only available for making offline games”, he said, “I hope one day online games can also be options so that my friends can also join me in the game.”
Huisheng has just moved to L.A. not long ago. Having been in U.S. for five months, his mother also shared her views on different education.
“I thought coding courses would be more comprehensive in America,” said Huisheng’s mother, “but it’s not. Due to the problems of funding and teachers, generally speaking, kids over third grade have chance to start courses on computer science. Under the circumstance, if children want to study coding at an early age, he needs to attend coding classes after school.
“Dad is my idol”
“Who is your idol?”
“My dad of course!” Huisheng replied with cheers, “He is a great programmer, and also very persistent. For example, he said he was going to lose weight, and he really did lose 30 pounds!” Parents are the mirrors of their kids, which leaves great influence on their children. Huisheng, as persistent as his father, are also committed to his works. Take his listed work Shuttle as an example. Huisheng revised 6 different versions to not only debug but also add more features to make his game more worth playing.
Programming is just like the process of building a sword that requires grinding and buffing. Through thousands of failures, a sword is finally made. This is also the sense of ingenuity that requires patience and dedication which is quite difficult for an eight year old kid.
Not long ago, Huisheng skipped graphical programming and went directly into Python. He said, “Frankly speaking, coding, compared to graphical programming, is more challenging and interesting, such as Python. As I study further, it is getting more and more difficult, challenging, and fun! I love to be challenged, and it doesn’t matter how many times that I fail. The sense of accomplishment after trials and errors… I’m so loving it!”
Kids’ future, Parents’ visions
When it comes to STEM education, especially programming, Huisheng’s parents are always supportive.
Huisheng’s father himself is a programmer, and he clearly knows that in future, programming is of vital importance. As Mark Zuckerberg said, programming education will be as important as reading and writing in 15 years, and then we will regret why we don’t start earlier.
Meanwhile, Huisheng’s mom happened to know CODE.GAME in a TV show. Since programming is a must in future, it will be really helpful to let kids start at an early age, so that they can lay a solid foundation which will ease them in their future study. Moreover, programming also serves a way to explore the world.
For programming studying, Huisheng’s dad doesn’t intervene too much. He believes that kids need to think independently and have their own habits. Huisheng is always encouraged by him, “You will be greater than me!”
In the progress of learning programming, connections between Codemao and Huisheng is very much like Doraemon and Nobita, befriended but also changing the way he sees the world.
For example, Huisheng used to thought that computer games are created by computers, but now he knows that games are all made by coding. Moreover, tools such as timer and calculator are also made by code. What impresses Huisheng most is that, in one of his Python classes, he learned about dynamic QR code, which can be an animation but also can be scanned to get access to a website.
“If it were not for programming, I will never have chance to meet all this wonderful stuff”, said Huisheng, “All games I made are currently in 2D. I’m planning to make a 3D flight game next. Just wait and I will have a breakthrough!”
