(1st January 2014)
Philip has discovered Python!
July 2012 was a great time for the Raspberry Pi in our house. We were a very early adopter and it became a very popular device during the summer holiday.
We made a number of videos showing some of the simple scratch games written by Philip at the age of 7. Whilst not being technically the most advanced pieces of code it did start him on a journey of discovery in coding.
Fast forward 18 month and my first Pi is now sat in the cupboard under the stairs as a file server and Philip has moved on from Scratch to writing batch files based on sample code he found online.
After much persuasion Philip encouraged me to buy another Pi for him to use for coding and playing Minecraft.
After getting onto the Pi store we decided to download a couple of game tutorials. The first one we found was for a Raspberry Pi version of space invaders. After playing a few games Philip said “I wish I had more lives and I didn’t die when it hits the bottom”. This was a great cue from me to say – “If we have a look at the code we might be able to change it!”
This was the moment where the penny dropped for Philip.
After having such good fun with Scratch I do hope that this develops into something he will be interested in!