The inspiration for the name of this blog came to me when I was searching the web for methods of teaching my ten year old son how to program. So I thought the subject would be a good topic for my very first blog post. Well, here goes. Go easy on me!

Getting Started

When I first began researching the best method for introducing my son to software development I came across numerous resources. The first one to really catch my eye was Microsoft's Beginning Developer Learning Center.  This site, of course, focuses mainly on the .NET development world but offers some great introduction to key programming concepts like, problem solving, how computers process data and even an introduction to HTML. The site provides a great set of lessons for my son and me to do together.

What I found out next

While these type of sites and lessons are interesting to me, my son did not find them so. After I thought about it I could see his point. I remember why I started programing, I want to play games. I started with a Commodore 64 with and a subscription to Compute Gazette and not even a single game cartridge. If I wanted to play a game I had to sit for countless hours typing line by line, games from the back of the magazine. Even then, once the game code had all been entered there would still be many more hours of debugging to find all the places where I had misspelled a word or used a period when it should have been a comma. Finally, the game was coded, debugged and ready to run.... What... oh no... the game SUCKS! What to do now? Having the spirit of youth I did not give up. If the game had a guy that ran I would make him run faster. If he shot bullets I would make him shoot more bullets. This is how I learned to program.

So what should I do?

Obvious! We should develop a simple game to introduce my son to the concepts of software development. I briefly fiddled around with Microsoft's XNA platform and found that although very interesting I just did not have the time nor the reason to dig very deep. Well, now I do! What better reason than to teach my son software development.

What next?

Over the next few weeks I will be continuing to post updates to our progress. This weekend we will be sitting down to our first design session to brainstorm about ideas for a simple game. If you have any ideas please feel free to post a comment below.