The Charette Project

As you may have read about earlier in the week, I am hosting a computer camp in my home this week, teaching Kodu and Small Basic programming to my 9-year old son Alex and nine of his friends.  Today we moved on from a first day of Kodu game programming to learning the basics of writing code with Small Basic.  It was even hotter today – and that definitely did not help things.  My goal was to get to something visual as quickly as possible but the campers needed a bit of foundation first.  The kids had so much fun yesterday with Kodu, for some of them it was all they could think...

On the First day of the Fairfax Computer Camp , a introduction to computer programming camp I’m running out of my home for a week, we started these 9-year-olds off with Kodu .  After setting up all of the computers that the kids brought in and hooking up a projector, I proceeded to start teaching these 10 kids about programming.  I started off with some simple ground rules about behavior in the camp and what was expected of them – and they all understood pretty well: respect for the house, respect for others, respect for the computers.  We then did a quick name game where each person...

My son Alex, age 9, wants to learn about computer programming so I decided to try something fun – to teach it to him.  In my day job, I explain and demonstrate Microsoft’s software development technologies and I’ve been programming since I was about ten so I think I know what to do.  I wanted to do something really fun for Alex, and kind of adventurous, so I invited 9 of his friends to join him and next week I will be teaching a group of 8 boys and 2 girls programming in my home on my dining room table.  Each camper will be bringing their family computer and I’ll be teaching Kodu...

Since a young age I was always good with computers. I spent many years of my adolescence tinkering on a personal computer: first TRS-80 s at school, and then an IBM PCjr at home. It was a logical progression from building cities with Lego blocks to building programs in BASIC on a computer. At the time, no one understood what I was doing, and I had a difficult time explaining it to my family. When I was in high school , I kept my interest in computers but also developed an interest in architecture and design. I attended the Career Discovery program at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and found...

5x7 Watercolor, Berlin, Germany, March 8, 1992 About this church ....

Barcelona, Spain, 4/14/1992, Fountain Pen

San Francisco, CA, 12/7/1995, Fountain pen and colored pencil

Bologna, Italy – 1/3/1992 – Colored pencil and marker

Lulu’s Alibi, West Los Angeles, CA - 2/11/1994

Westwood, CA - 8/16/1993 – Fountain pen