So we had our son take a tour of Code Ninjas yesterday.

They have him “play a game” where he has to come up with the JavaScript function calls that move his player through a dungeon and attack an ogre through 5 levels (just a small portion of the game played for the tour.) They said he did really well for his age, which I’m honestly not surprised, because my wife and I have let him basically watch adult YouTube for a long time, where he has been able to look at Roblox Studio tutorials. (YouTube is somewhat good at serving age appropriate content, although there have been instances early on where he watched videos that had a lot of swearing in it, so he learned all that early on.😅 Honestly though, I think it’s better that he’s aware of these words early on, and knows to not “join in” when someone else says them later on.)

I’ve also helped him (really only a little bit) learn how to use Roblox Studios and helped him with writing code, or when he’s stuck in a tutorial.

Also him playing Roblox, along with it’s chat feature (which is pretty well filtered for his age) has really allowed him to learn how to type (not proper finger locations, but he can still type pretty fast for his age).

He loved Code Ninjas, so we’re going to enroll him. They basically start him playing that game, teach him basics of programming through JavaScript, then he works his way up to Lua and C# and eventually using Unity (game engine). Some people might think, “Why don’t you just teach him yourself?”, and that’s fair, but it’s not that easy to keep an 8-year old’s attention. Code Ninjas has the right tools and have been doing this for a little while now, and that environment can do some things for him that I can’t. Not to mention, I’ll still continue to help him at home with his Roblox coding and help teach him how to make music/sound FX for his games and such.

What really has amazed me is where he’s at at 8 years old. He can create a bunch of static models in Roblox (or add community generated content) to his game. At his age, my parents had just gotten an Apple II and we learned how to insert a disk in the drive and follow a few instructions.😆 He’s so far ahead of where I was, it’s kind of crazy to stop and think about it. I didn’t start learning to code until I was in high school. Of course, the times are completely different and he has access to so much more, but it’s still amazing to me. I can’t wait to see what he does.