Introducing Kindergartners to Coding
I recently had the opportunity to present at my daughter’s Kindergarten Career Day. As the VP of Engineering at Public Good, this provided me a chance to explore what technology and programming mean to both kindergartners and to many of their parents who aren’t immersed in a technology for a living. The presentation also had to be engaging and meaningful for the kids, lest I risk boring 38 six year olds and suffer the dire consequences.
I wanted to make my time in front of the kids relevant to them, so I considered the questions that my daughter asks nearly every day shortly after she wakes up. What is the weather like today? What’s for school lunch? Together, we decided to build a kid-friendly site that would answer these questions for families belonging to the Smines City classroom. I also wanted to provide an opportunity for inquisitive parents and kids to peek inside what is often seen as a black box of technology.
To implement the site, I chose a similar toolset to the one we use here at PGS to operationalize journalistic analysis.
- Github provides the perfect place to store the codebase, so anyone interested in the site’s technical details can dive right in by reading the code or even grabbing their own copy to hack on.
- The Python programming language — and in particular the Flask web application framework — along with a few libraries we use at PGS for scraping web pages, provides a relatively simple foundation for the application. We think Python is one of the best languages for teaching new programmers.
- I also chose a few simple libraries for making the pages look nice and for working with the Dark Sky weather API.
- While we don’t deploy applications to Heroku at Public Good, I did choose to do so for this application due to Heroku’s simplicity and ease of deployment. In fact, you can deploy your own copy of the app just by following the instructions in the Github README.
The full presentation is available if this has piqued your curiousity. The Github README links to a number of resources for those looking to learn a bit about programming, too.
By the way, if you ever want to really wow a group of Kinders, just throw up a photo of a python snake and enjoy their gasps and applause.
