Small Minds

Tuesday 24 April 2012 at 22:45 BST

I had the opportunity on Sunday to help mentor kids at a one-off CoderDojo in Shoreditch. After a head count, we realised we had as many mentors as kids, so we got to pair up one-on-one. After drawing straws to find out who was going to help the eight-year-old boy with deploying a PHP and MySQL webapp—not one of us could remember how on earth PHP worked—we sat down and got cracking.

This was the first time Noah, my assigned mentee, had done anything that required hacking out text—he was more used to a Microsoft drag-and-drop game designer called Kodu. I thought that after playing with graphical stuff, he might find HTML and CSS a bit boring, but after getting over his initial shyness, he was really enthusiastic about it. We spent some time going through the basics, and for a short time, he struggled to get to grips with the concept of text that changed the way other text worked, but before long we were embedding YouTube videos and linking everything together.

There's a certain class of questions that are only asked by children and newbies. They're pretty valuable. They usually start with "Why", and often follow a "What". Things like, 'What does <a> mean?' 'Er, why is it called "anchor"?' After we've been working in the field for more than a few months, let alone a few years, we often forget to ask the obvious—something I'll be tackling in my next post.

It's a wonderful feeling when you meet a 10 year old who's really interested in anything. When they're interested in the same field as you, that's just a bonus. I was so glad to meet Noah and find out what made him tick, and I'm looking forward to seeing him again and discovering how his website has developed in the mean time at a future CoderDojo. I really encourage anyone with a passion for their craft to sign up and help teach small kids how this stuff works.