A Teenager Gets Grilled By Her Dad About Why She’s Not That Into Coding

(Turns out that it’s kinda-sorta her digitally aware dad’s fault.)

By Sylvie and Jay Rosen

Sylvie Rosen, 17, is a high school senior in New York. Her father, Jay Rosen, 58, is a journalism professor at New York University.

Jay: Have you taken any kind of programming class?

Sylvie: I’m taking a beginner programming class this semester, and I took a seminar on programming with physics during freshman year. This semester we started at a very basic level, coding lines, balls, colors: Now we’re working on balls colliding. The class is taught in what the teacher calls a “flipped environment.” He assigns videos to watch for homework, and we work on the new topics in class. Any questions or debugging gets worked on in class.

Jay: Why did you elect to take a beginning course in programming?

Sylvie: It was a different kind of opportunity that I’d not been offered before (aside from that freshman seminar), and I was interested in discovering whether or not I enjoy programming. At my school, there…